It’s become increasingly common for private practice lawyers to make the move in-house, but Rashda Rana adds a new twist to the familiar tale. Rana started her professional career as a barrister in England in specialist construction chambers. When she made the move to Australia, she again resumed her practice at the bar in construction and general commercial matters. But change was beckoning.

“I wanted to have greater involvement in matters before they got to me,” she says. “When I took on matters as a barrister, I thought ‘if only the client had come to me six months or a year ago – the case might have been different’.”

As a result, Rana joined Holding Redlich in July 2008, yet the move from the bar to private practice proved to be challenging. “Suddenly you go from being self-employed to being in a partnership where the governance is different from what you’re used to,” she says. One aspect of private practice life which particularly struck her was the meetings – what she describes as a culture of having “lots of meetings – and then having meetings about meetings.”

“Those meetings are necessary because you are working in an internal organisation and you have to decide how you’re going to proceed – but coming from

In-house perspectiIvea barrister background it was different,” she says. “For instance, if I had a meeting as a barrister it was actually a work meeting. It was always about work, it was charged as work and actually went towards the issues in the case you were dealing with.”

Moving in-house

Rana enjoyed her year of private practice experience, but felt that the work still did not meet her desire for early involvement in legal matters. “Private practice didn’t always allow that early involvement; you were still at the behest of the client,” she says.

By moving to the general counsel role at Bovis Lend Lease (Australia), she, in effect, became the client. Bovis Lend Lease is the project management, design and construction arm of integrated property company Lend Lease. Rana’s legal team has a threefold function in the organisation: advise on upcoming deals, act as counsel for projects already underway, and dispute resolution.

It is well established that many construction projects have been put on hold pending an easing of the availability of funding. Government attempts to stimulate the sector have had mixed results, but Rana says that the overall impact has been positive for Bovis Lend Lease. “We have had a variety of contracts in each state,” she says. Partly as a result of this workload, Rana is looking to recruit additional lawyers to join her current seven-lawyer practice team.

However, she says that this growth is not necessarily all attributable to an increase in construction work. Rana also attributes it to a greater involvement by the legal team in the Bovis Lend Lease business – and also a pre-existing shortage of resources.

External counsel

Rana and her team are currently reviewing arrangements for external counsel. “We will probably set up panels for a number of areas – for example, one panel for OH&S advice,a panel for disputes, a panel for PPPs and drafting and so on,” she says. “We’re looking to have top-tier and mid-tier people to handle different types of work.”

Like many other general counsels, Rana is looking to reduce the size of the panels. “For each kind of expertise, we’re looking to have only two to three advisers and we’re going to limit the duration of those appointments,” she explains. “So rather than appointing a panel for five years, we’re going to limit it to say two years.”

Rana says that the reduction in panel size is an industry trend and explains what she hopes to achieve with the process: “If you have a few firms getting a fair share of work each, you’ll get economies of scale and efficiency, as firms get to know your business and understand the commercial imperatives. That’s the key question: are firms doing the work efficiently because they’ve got the right people? If they are ... it won’t cost me a packet.”

What constitutes good law firm service? “Availability,” says Rana promptly, “What I dislike is calling someone and not receiving a reply for a week. I deliberately put questions in my emails to speed up the process.”

Goals

While it’s early days yet, but Rana has one goal which transcends all others in the role: to make her team a fully integrated part of the business. “What I want to get away from is the notion that the legal team is just a “tack-on”. There’s already been a cultural shift in the business here. There's recognition that legal can add value to a business or transaction by looking at risks earlier on, preventing risks from eventuating, and dealing with the risks that do eventuate,” she says. “I want the legal team to be as strong a spoke in the business wheel as any other spoke in the business – that will make for an overall stronger business.”

Outside her Bovis Lend Lease position, Rana is also an adjunct professor at the University of Sydney's Sydney Law School and teaches an undergraduate course in international commercial arbitration – the first undergraduate course in Australia taught on that subject. She is also heavily involved in industry organisations and is, inter alia, a founding member and the current secretary of the newly-formed Society of Construction Law in Australia.