Written by Ariane Ang and Justine Tee
What is Construction Law?
Construction law deals with the legal issues that arise during the course of a construction project. It is one of few areas of law that is defined by the industry it supports (ie. construction) rather than by the particular speciality of the lawyers (eg. property law). Therefore, construction lawyers' practise can involve contract law, tort law, employment law and other areas.
Phillip Greenham
Independent Arbitrator
Phillip Greenham has been working in construction law for over 35 years. He was previously a partner at MinterEllison for 27 years, where he headed the construction practice for 13 years. Phillip has made significant contributions to government projects throughout his career. He is a founding member of the Society of Construction Law Australia and is currently a member of the International Construction Projects Committee of the International Bar Association.
Today, Phillip works as an independent arbitrator and continues to provide legal advice to a small number of clients. He is also developing an IT product that will help streamline the administration of construction contracts. Lastly, Phillip is an enterprise fellow at the University of Melbourne, where he lectures and manages research in relation to issues that connect the law with the construction industry.
INTERVIEW
How would you describe construction law to someone who knows little about the area?
In my mind, construction law is really nothing more than applied contract and tort law. That’s not to say that contract and tort law encompasses all of construction law because clearly, you have statutes which impact on it, for example the Australian Consumer Law. But it is primarily applied contract and tort law. The thing which makes construction law different from other areas is its very tight connection to a particular industry. If you look at the way law firms practice, and the way law firms organise themselves, for example, there are not many areas which focus on an industry. Most areas of legal activity focus on a particular legal concept - property law or taxation for example. Construction is an example of where the practice focuses quite acutely on a particular industry. So the real differentiation of construction law from other areas of practice is that tight connection between the legal disciplines and the industry, and of course, a whole raft of things which flow from that, which include the terminology, the commercial behaviours, the historical context, the economic context. All of that moulds into understanding and the effective deployment of construction law.
As a student, were you certain that construction law was the area you wanted to practice in?
When I was studying at Monash from 1976 to 1983, there was no subject of construction law offered at any university in Australia. I think the first offering of construction law as a subject was when Professor Gerber, as she now is, introduced the first construction law course in Australia at the University of Melbourne about 25 years ago. So, when I was a student, no, construction law was not on my mind. I didn’t actually enjoy university all that much, and I wasn’t a very successful law student. I had other things on my mind and other things to do. What I was really focused on was just getting a job, any job. The economy wasn’t in such good shape at the time and it wasn’t easy to get a job. I was extremely lucky to secure a job with Ellison Hewison & Whitehead (now MinterEllison). In fact, the reason that I got an interview with Ellison Hewison & Whitehead (which I only found out recently as I am still in contact with the then Managing Partner, Rob Stewart) was because during the vacation time at university, I had driven trams, and he had never spoken to a tram driver before. That’s why he decided to interview me for a job. Now, it was probably more than my tram-driving credentials that then got me the job, but certainly they got me the interview.
The job that I was offered was unusual at the time. When law graduates today enter practice, there is quite a structured way in which they move through various areas of practice in order to understand where they might be best suited. When I got my job at Ellison Hewison & Whitehead there was no such structure. You went into an area and that was really it. Although the position advertised was given to someone else, Ellison Hewison & Whitehead were still interested in me and offered me a job nonetheless. They said that they would rotate me around four areas over the course of 12 months and see how things worked out. The first area I worked in was workers’ compensation, which I spent three months doing. The second area I worked in was construction law. I then waited for 30-odd years for them to move me to the third and fourth areas, and it never happened, and I just remained in construction law.
I very quickly came to love it for two main reasons – one reason was because of the particular environment at Ellison Hewison & Whitehead in which I was working. At that time, construction law experts were few and far between, and construction law had not generally been distilled as a separate discipline that practitioners would practice. Frank Shelton was the partner at Ellison Hewison & Whitehead who I was working with during those second three months. He was one of the few practitioners, together with John Sharkey and others, who were actually specifically focussing on construction law. The construction law practice at Ellison Hewison & Whitehead at the time was one partner, Frank, one senior associate, who spent half of his time doing construction work, and a junior lawyer, who came to be me. So, part of my enthusiasm for construction law was because of that small environment through which I had the opportunity to develop the understanding and skills. It was also because Frank Shelton, who later became Judge Shelton of the County Court, was such a terrific mentor and teacher. He was such a generous person to work for, and the environment was simply terrific. I was given such independence very early on in my career and I embraced that. So, the environment itself generated enthusiasm.
The other thing that Frank also did from the start was to introduce me to the industry organisations that were connected with construction law. For example, the Housing Industry Association. We did a lot of work for the Housing Industry Association and the Housing Guarantee Fund, which was the compulsory residential building insurer at the time. Very early on, Frank offered me the opportunity to conduct one of his lectures at the University of Melbourne that he was doing at the time. I received very early exposure to the connection point between the law and the construction industry, and that was extremely interesting. It was that experience which enlivened my interest and enthusiasm for construction law, rather than thinking about it at all when I was in university, because I didn’t!
“It was that experience which enlivened my interest and enthusiasm for construction law, rather than thinking about it at all when I was in university, because I didn’t!”
Can you tell us about your day-to-day life as a construction lawyer?
My life as a construction lawyer changed significantly throughout the 30-odd years at MinterEllison and of course, it is now completely different to what it was when I was at MinterEllison. One of the most noticeable changes was, for the first couple of years, you really have no idea what you’re doing, and you can be quite tense about that. I was going to say ‘stressed’, but you don’t have to be stressed about it. You can be tense and anxious about it without being stressed about it. I remember when I was a second-year lawyer, Frank Shelton went on sabbatical for three months and the only person in the construction group then was me, a second-year lawyer for three months. That was nerve-racking, but a tremendous learning opportunity.
For the first two or three years, you really have no idea what you’re doing, you’re feeling a bit anxious about it all, but you are absorbing and learning so much. Of course, you’ll never know everything, and it's a question of being comfortable about the fact that you don’t know everything but still being able to move ahead and deal with the problem at hand even though you don’t know everything. So, after those first couple of years, you feel more comfortable at that point in time, and I think this is quite different to practice now.
Most of my work was dispute work, and I probably had 200 files that I managed at that point in time. They were a mixture of Magistrate Court files, County Court files, Supreme Court files, arbitration files, and files which weren’t part of any formal dispute resolution process. For a practitioner in the construction law area today to be managing 200 files would be really quite unusual. But it was quite common then, and probably for the next 10 years of my practice. That was what I had to manage – 200 files in various dispute contexts. As time marched on, I did more front-end work, which involved contract drafting as well. Every day you’d probably meet a client. Some days you’d have client meetings all day, and it would be a challenge at the end of the day after having had a full day of client meetings to then having to process all of the information and everything that needed to be done as a result of those meetings.
By the time I became a partner after six years at MinterEllison, I had more people working for me, and the group had grown. So I was doing less hands-on work, whereas when you’re a junior to middle level lawyer, everything that you’re doing is hands-on legal work. But as you become a more experienced practitioner, you are doing less hands-on legal work, and you’re doing more management work. That might be people management work, in terms of mentoring junior lawyers at work. It might be overseeing the files that those junior lawyers are working on. You’ve got a lot of firm management work to do as well – business development and internal firm committees and the like. By the last five or six years of my time at MinterEllison, I would say that 10-15% of my work was client-facing legal work, and the rest of my work was management work. Indeed, after I left MinterEllison one of the things I missed most was the mentoring of junior solicitors, because at the very tail end of my time there I could sometimes spend three whole days a week just talking to junior lawyers who would come into my office wanting to talk about a file that they were managing and decisions which had to be made, strategic planning to be done about the file and the like.
The practice changes over time and the way I described the practice when I began then would be very different to the way someone would experience the commencement of their practice today. If you were a young construction lawyer today starting at a firm like MinterEllison, your experience would be very different to what mine was. You wouldn’t have personal responsibility for 200 files, for example. It might be a little while before you have personal responsibility for any particular file. You might have personal responsibility for a particular range of activities in relation to a file, but not the file overall. So, the way in which the law is practised is very, very different.
“…one of the most important things that a young law graduate can learn is … how to become comfortable in a perpetual state of ignorance. You’ll never know everything, there will always be someone out there who knows something that you don’t know. And if you don’t find that point of comfort in that state of ignorance, then you won’t have a comfortable professional life.”
You mentioned that you used to oversee 200+ files at once, which is uncommon for a practising lawyer today. What’s changed since then, and what’s the most difficult aspect of your job as a construction lawyer right now?
If you’re looking at dispute work, for example, the economics of disputes has changed dramatically. I mentioned that a number of my files would have been in the Magistrates’ Court. I believe the monetary limit in the Magistrates’ Court at the time was perhaps $20,000, and I might have had 30 Magistrates’ Court files. So that’s 30 disputes where people were fighting over an amount of money worth less than $20,000. If someone came to me today and was talking about commencing formal legal proceedings over the pursuit of $20,000 I would advise them very strongly against it because to be able to run a formal legal dispute in a way that represents a net positive return on a $20,000 dispute, even if you have absolute victory, is impossible. So, I think the financial dynamics have changed dramatically.
There just isn’t the volume of dispute files to begin with. If you look at the number of cases in the Building List (as it then was when I started in the Supreme Court) or the Technology, Engineering and Construction List now, each month there would be a call over of all the cases in the Building List. It was terrific because as a junior lawyer, we did not brief this work out to barristers. I would go up to the practice court and the Building List in the Supreme Court every month and I would have maybe 15 files to get through in the practice court on that day and sit there all day. You’d be sitting there watching more experienced people on their feet, in front of the judge in charge and you’d learn so much. It was tremendous. There could have been 30 or 40 cases in the Supreme Court Building Cases List then. Now, there might be four or five. The whole economics of large construction disputes has changed, so I think that’s one of the changes.
I think another thing that has changed, and this is more so in terms of larger firms than smaller firms, is the financial dynamics of firms. They are enormous machines, like a car or petrol tank, that you just have to keep filling up. That influences the kind of work that those firms will do. The kind of work which I was doing when I began at Ellison Hewison & Whitehead, MinterEllison wouldn’t look at now because it just wouldn’t be financially viable. It wouldn’t be appropriate for the client, they would have to pay too much to get that work done. It’s both the question of the economics of the dispute landscape and the economics of running a legal business which I think, have been the most significant changes.
You asked me about the most challenging, or most difficult thing. I think it's work-life balance. One of my ex-partners from MinterEllison who is now no longer there also didn’t like the expression ‘work-life balance’ because she was of the view that, if you’re a lawyer, particularly a lawyer in a busy practice, there is no “work-life balance”. So, to try and pursue “work-life balance” is illusory and you’d just set yourself up to fail. But, you have to find a way to be able to keep the non-working elements of your personality alive and nurture it, and also to focus on the people around you – your family and anyone else you have connections with – because you can't lose those connections. It was juggling that dynamic that I found most challenging. There was nothing in the legal practice I really found that challenging. Of course, you have challenging moments, but there was nothing that was chronically challenging. What was more challenging over a period of time was balancing my home life and family life. In particular, I was lucky because I’m a man and it's easier for a man (a father at that point in time) than a mother, for example. My wife was working and we had three children under five, but we were lucky enough to be able to have a nanny. That was at a time when I was a young partner at MinterEllison. There were probably four years there which were very, very tough. But the toughness wasn’t to do with the legal work, it was to do with managing the intensity of that dynamic.
As the most difficult part is balancing your time with your family and all your relationships, how do you personally do it?
I got up very early in the morning. I spent probably 25 years getting up at somewhere between four and five o’clock in the morning and I’d be in the office within half an hour. I found that those hours in the morning were the most productive hours of the day for me, particularly as I became a more senior lawyer and there were more demands on my time during the day. That enabled me to try to get home for dinner before the children went to bed, at least three nights a week. I would be leaving the office at somewhere between half past five or half past six. That time rhythm is a little different to the way many lawyers work, who perhaps come in a little later and finish a little later, but that’s how I tried to preserve the time to do other things that I wanted to do. One thing about being a lawyer in the environment I was in was that it was very intense, and I thrived on that, absolutely loved it, and I still do. But you did have to find the space to do other things, and that’s how I did it.
“There were probably four years there which were very, very tough. But the toughness wasn’t to do with the legal work, it was to do with managing the intensity of that dynamic.”
What has been a highlight in your career?
There are a few highlights. One of them is watching young lawyers grow. Particularly when you have a young lawyer who grows and either becomes a partner in the firm or becomes an in-house counsel somewhere and carves out their own career, that’s very, very satisfying.
But in terms of cases I’ve worked on, the one which I’d say is probably the highlight was an arbitration. Arbitrations are generally private, but this particular arbitration found its way into the court system and so what I’m saying is on the public record. This was an arbitration about the Murrin Murrin nickel and cobalt plant in Western Australia which was being developed by Andrew Forrest before he found success in his current iron ore ventures. We were acting for Fluor, an American EPC (Engineering, Procurement & Construction) contractor. Difficulties had arisen between Fluor and Forrest about the design and building of the plant and an arbitration was commenced. That arbitration, at the time, was the largest construction arbitration in Australia. It lasted over five years. The arbitration hearing which was held in two parts was on the basis of a chess clock hearing, and it was the first chess clock arbitration in Australia, so there were a number of firsts associated with this. At its peak, we had a team of 20-25 lawyers at MinterEllison and 20 barristers working on that. Apart from the complexity and intricacy of the legal issues, it was an enormous project to manage. We had two partners working on that matter, myself and Peter Wood, who now heads up the construction division at MinterEllison. I was in the very lucky position of effectively managing the legal strategy and managing the project, so I could call upon all of those people and resources that I mentioned worked very hard at doing what they needed to do. It was very intense. Although there was ebb and flow, that intensity lasted for 5 years. That is now, if I remember rightly, finished maybe 10 or more years ago. I still catch up with people who worked on that matter, some of whom are still at MinterEllison. Even though it was intense and people got fatigued, they still say to me “gee, I wish we had another one of those”. Because the esprit de corps which developed around that matter, the collegiality, the learning, the highs and the lows, it was such a rewarding thing to be involved in and as I say, whilst the intensity was at times fatiguing, people long for it.
One of the most interesting highlights of that was that in December one year, we had submissions that had to be delivered to the arbitrators by a particular date. It was a panel of three arbitrators, and they were drawn from around the world – one Australian, one Englishman and one Frenchman. As is always the case, you’re always scrambling at 11:59 to produce the last version of your closing submission. We had to get this delivered before Christmas, and it had to be physically delivered. However, in terms of our time for production, we could no longer secure delivery by courier. The only way we could secure delivery within time was for someone to fly it to Paris. So, here we were, a few days before Christmas with very lengthy submissions that were a suitcase’s worth of lever arch folders. We sent an email to the 20-odd lawyers working on this saying – who would like a plane trip to London and Paris for Christmas? One young lawyer put her hand up and volunteered to do it. We only had, I think, a day to get everything in order and get her to the airport. Turns out, she’d lost her passport and we had to get an urgent passport replacement from the Department of Foreign Affairs, which we were able to get! She got to the airport within hours of the plane taking off, and off she went to London and Paris to deliver the submissions. So, there was a whole lot of fun and interesting stuff associated with the project. That would be the highlight.
“It was stressful, but particularly when you had that collegian atmosphere, the stress is, in a sense, fun in itself!”
What kind of skills would you say are needed to work in construction law?
If I look at the mix of people that I managed at MinterEllison, I observed a variety of skills. You have people who are excellent in terms of black letter law – they remember all the cases and have a very sharp legal mind. You have other people who can digest an enormous volume of factual material. One of the things with construction disputes is that there is an enormous amount of factual material. These people can sift through it and distil the essence of what’s important from that great factual material.
You’ve got to be able to manage, process and project. Every file you’re running, whether it’s a dispute or whether it's drafting a contract for a front-end project and the like, it’s a project, so you have to be able to project-manage and manage people. But above all, you have to be able to solve problems, because everything that comes in front of you is a problem. The reason that a person has brought it to you is that there is a problem that has to be resolved. You have to be able to come up with strategies to solve that problem. Often enough, it’s a question of thinking of a slightly different strategy, not applying the same strategy that you applied yesterday. Particularly in the dispute context, where it's not just to do with the tactics of how you manage the dispute. It's not just a question of where the legal weight might lie, but it's also a question about the way in which you engage in conversation and the way in which you negotiate and the like.
I think, probably at the top of the list is an analytical mind and a problem-solving ability.
You’ll see that those two particular skills which I’ve put at the top of the list aren’t peculiar to lawyers, and they’re not necessarily taught explicitly as part of a law course. They might be things that you develop and practice as part of your law course, but they’re not explicitly taught as part of a law course.
Do you have any other tips for aspiring construction lawyers to help them stand out when applying for clerkships/internships, and how would you recommend getting some of the skills that you’ve recommended?
When you’re applying for a job as a new graduate, and you want to stand out, I don’t think that the task is any different for a construction lawyer compared to any other lawyer.
I think the first thing is – and I might be out of touch when I say this – but my impression is that the overwhelming number of graduates from law schools see the prize to achieve is a place in a first-tier law firm. And anything else is kind of a bronze or silver medal, rather than the gold medal. I understand this to a certain extent, but I think that it’s an enormous mistake because there’s only a small percentage of graduates that will initially find that opportunity. So, if you have narrowly set your sight on that opportunity as representing success, and representing the gold medal, then you’re potentially going to be disappointed. But you ought not be disappointed, because there are such an enormous variety of ways to practice the law.
The other thing to bear in mind, as a graduate who might be trying to secure that gold medal, is the degree of randomness that is associated with whether you actually achieve that result in the short-term or not. Just because you might not have secured that position that you might be longing for, doesn’t mean that you have failed, and it doesn’t represent any rational judgment on who you are and your ability because there is so much randomness about it. Law firms get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of applications, and it is their HR departments that go through them in the first instance, making a decision about who is going to get interviewed by the partners in the firm. That first cull might be a cull from 700+ applications, to maybe 100 people who are going to be interviewed. At that point, six out of seven people are being put to one side on the basis of whatever criteria a HR department is applying to those people. There is such a degree of randomness about what criteria might be applied at that point, and whether it happens to be the first application the person is looking at, or the hundredth, when they’ve got fatigued!
So, the first thing is, broaden your thinking about what represents success and don’t personalise not getting that “prize” the first time round.
Second thing I’d say is, during my time at MinterEllison, I read lots of applications and was interviewing other people. I was so grateful that I wasn’t looking for a job now, because the applications which come through now, people have done so much to demonstrate what a fully engaged, fully rounded person they are – they’ve done this, they’ve done that on this committee or that committee, and I had nothing like that. I had ‘Tram Driver’ on mine. To a certain extent, everyone now has that really long list of a full CV, and it can become a bit ho-hum! Because there’s nothing in it which has one person stand out from another. It’s finding what it is about you that is so interesting and so unique, and finding a way to present that to the person who is opening the letter, and it might be the hundredth letter they’re opening, such that it captures their attention, and it's telling that part of the story of you as a person, which will capture someone’s attention.
The last thing I’d say is, even if you don’t succeed in getting that first job which you want, remember that there’s the end of first year, the end of second year, the end of third year as a lawyer, there are opportunities to move laterally. Indeed, many of the best recruits I’ve made when I was in charge of recruitment for the construction group at Minter’s were lateral hires at a second, third, fourth year level rather than graduate hires. So, don’t despair if you miss out the first time round, there’s always an opportunity a year or two down the track.
“... you have to be able to solve problems, because everything that comes in front of you is a problem. ... Often enough, it’s a question of thinking of a slightly different strategy, not applying the same strategy that you applied yesterday. ”
Are there any major developments within the industry that may impact work as a construction lawyer, and where do you think construction law will go in the future?
A general comment first about history. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed this in your studies of the law, and I didn’t when I was studying the law, if you look at the development of the common law, and the common law is such an interesting thing to look at how it develops and evolves. It can be languid on a particular issue for quite some period of time and then there can be some energetic evolution on a particular principle. When I talk about energetic evolution, sometimes it takes 25, 50 years for there to be energetic evolution. So, “energetic” has a slightly different meaning in the question of the development of the common law. But if you look at the development of the common law, so much of it has taken place in the context of construction cases, because often there is so much to lose in construction disputes. There’s a real vibrancy to the development of the common law and its connection with construction cases. The doctrine of liquidated damages and penalties – most of the cases in relation to that will come out of construction law, for example. That’s the history, and I think that will also be the future.
One example of where you see that in the future, and I think this is one of the areas where there’s the continuing opportunity for energetic evolution in legal principles, which is taking place in the construction law arena – is the principle of good faith. To what extent is the obligation to behave with good faith implied into every contract in Australian jurisprudence? I think the answer to the question at the moment is – it is not implied into every contract. It is implied into some contracts, in some contexts, in relation to some clauses. But if you look at America now, for example, the restatement of contract law has the obligation of good faith implied into every contract. But before that was embodied in the restatement, it was a development in the common law in America. So, America was far ahead of where Australia is, and Australia is ahead of where England is on the question of ‘when is there an implied term of good faith?’ I think that’s an example of an area where there will be development in the construction law arena.
The other area is in relation to the interpretation of contracts and bearing in mind that the fundamental task of the court when you're interpreting and construing a contract is to ascertain the objective intention of the parties. There have been some recent cases where courts have pulled rabbits out of the hat in the way in which they have almost overlooked the explicit words on the page to speculate what might’ve been the objective intention of the parties and to give effect to that surmised objective intention, rather than what might have appeared to be the meaning from the express words from the page. That great flexibility and creativity in the interpretation of contracts is something that’s really being developed through construction law.
I think construction law has been and will continue to be a very energetic area of the evolution of the common law generally.
“... if you look at the development of the common law, so much of it has taken place in the context of construction cases, because often there is so much to lose in construction disputes. There’s a real vibrancy to the development of the common law and its connection with construction cases.”
STUDENT QUESTIONS
What are your thoughts on the Opal Tower lawsuits?
I’ll speak in relation to the Opal Tower and Lacrosse. I think Lacrosse is more advanced in the journey of the legal process than the Opal Tower ones, but they’re both fascinating examples of a close connection point between social policy and the law, and the extent to which your views about appropriate policy outcomes ought to be reflected in the law. Because what you have at the end of the day is a large number of individuals who aren’t necessarily wealthy, but who will be burdened significantly with the cost of dealing with very serious physical defects in their building unless the law provides them with some means of redress. One of the things I do is that I lecture at the University of Melbourne as well, and we’ve just finished a series on construction law. On the last day of that, we had a panel discussion where we bring in representatives of the insurance industry, building surveyors etcetera to talk about issues. The issue we spoke about this year was: the extent to which the current legal rules provide meaningful, convenient solutions for those individuals at the end of the burden chain who will suffer the burden of the consequences of these unfortunate buildings unless the legal system provides them with a solution. Does the legal system provide them with a solution? Is it a convenient solution? Is it a fair solution? I think that there’s not a lot of clarity around the answers to those questions at the moment, and it’s a real challenge for the legal system as to whether it will be able to provide a solution. If it doesn’t provide a solution, it loses credibility. If it loses credibility, people lose respect for it. So, ultimately, it has to provide a credible, convenient solution. Whether that actually occurs in the context of the Opal Tower lawsuits, or whether it fails in that context and we have to watch the law evolve a little bit more, or perhaps statutory intervention. And it's interesting. This is where proportionate liability, which was introduced at the behest of insurers, to look after the commercial viability of insurers. It really did not pay any attention at all to managing what might be the prejudicial impact on the final user of our built environment. Perhaps the blowtorch is going to be put to the proportionate liability regime because it could undermine the ability of those apartment owners to enjoy success. I think the Opal Tower lawsuits and the Lacrosse lawsuits are fascinating to watch, though I’m not convinced that they will deliver appropriate social outcomes yet. But they might be part of the journey towards the system being reformed so that better social outcomes are delivered out of it.
As a student who studies Law/Civil Engineering, how can this combination of studies be beneficial in practising construction law?
It's an interesting question. I think I mentioned that I did Science/Law at Monash, and at the time I think Monash was the only university that offered Science/Law, and it was quite an unusual combination at the time. Engineering/Law was probably even less common at the time. I first encountered dual Engineering/Law graduates after about 10 years at Minters’, maybe in the mid to late 80’s. At that time they were quite a novel beast and they attracted quite a lot of attention. People had this idea that they’d be great in engineering disputes because they have this engineering perspective as well. There are now so many dual discipline graduates around, they’re not so uncommon. It's not as if an Engineering/Law graduate stands out so starkly as they might have in the past. But there’s no doubt they are of interest.
What is, and this might be discouraging to the student who asked this question, of more interest is people who have practised as an engineer for a period of time. Typically, it might’ve been five years or so that someone might’ve practised as an engineer and then decided, either perhaps they didn’t have a law degree and they went and did a law degree, or they were dual qualified, did engineering first and then came to practise law. Those people are of real interest to law firms when they are recruiting. One of the things lawyers can get heavily criticised for by the construction industry is that they don’t have the ability to think other than as lawyers. If you’ve done five years working as an engineer before you started working as a lawyer, you’ve got a completely different pattern of thinking potentially than you might’ve had if you’d started as a lawyer, and that can be of real interest. And you’ve also got that intimate knowledge of the real-world context of the problems which are coming to be solved by you. Engineering/Law graduates who have practised as an engineer for a period are of real interest.
I might mention too, that a little while ago, someone said to me that they thought there were only two university courses which disassembled your brain and reassembled it so that at the end of the course the way in which you thought and the way in which you analysed problems was completely different - those two courses being engineering and law.
Suggested Electives/activities:
Electives:
LAW4190 - Construction Law: Principles and Practice
LAW4244 - Construction Law (Dispute Resolution)
LAW5372 - Contemporary Perspectives on Construction Law
LAW4301 - Advanced Torts / LAW5003 - Principles of Torts
Experience/Activities:
Join the Society of Construction Law Australia to network and access exclusive articles
Complete virtual and/or in-person internships
IN THE NEWS
Lacrosse fire ruling sends shudders through building industry consultants and governments (the conversation, 2019)
Geoff Hanmer comments on the ruling on the Lacrosse apartment fires. The fire erupted after a cigarette came into contact with the combustible cladding lining the building.
“…in our adversarial legal system, there are losers as well as winners. The losers in this case are the fire engineer, the certifier and the architects.”
Construction Law Update August 2021 (minterellison, 2021)
Andrew Hales, Andrew Orford, Jeanette Barbaro and David Pearce write on the latest developments in construction law around Australia.
“In terms of private market space, Corrs predicted withdrawals from deals, but bold buyers may find opportunities. For deals which don’t fall over, the firm expects to see an increase in deferred consideration structures to “bridge valuation gaps” between all parties.”
learn more about construction law
Construction law made easy (minterellison)
Authored and produced by MinterEllison’s construction team, Construction Law Made Easy provides clear explanations of widely-used construction law concepts and terms, supplemented by real life examples and summaries of relevant cases.
Coronavirus: Potential Implications for Major Construction and Infrastructure Projects in Australia (jones day, 2020)
This White Paper by Jones Day provides an overview of some of the COVID-19-related risks that major projects in Australia face, legal and regulatory considerations and key steps that participants should consider in order to proactively manage the risks to protect their commercial positions and the success of their projects..
National Construction Code (NCC) (housing industry association)
An overview and introduction to the National Construction Code - who relies on it, how it is enforced, situations it should be used and more.
What Construction Dispute Resolution Methods are Available? (morrissey law)
Morrissey Law provides an overview to dispute resolution methods available to parties in a construction dispute.
the health of the australian Construction industry (sharkey et al, 2020)
A collaborative research report by a team of leading construction lawyers highlighting some key challenges the construction industry faces in improving the health and sustainability of the industry, and providing suggestions as to what stakeholders can do to facilitate positive changes.