How we grow our people

Chapman Tripp’s litigation & dispute resolution team acts on New Zealand’s most significant commercial disputes. The team solves our clients’ problems and disputes, in differing ways: through negotiations, mediations, arbitrations or through the Courts, working with our clients to secure a resolution that works best for them. We deal with large-scale disputes in our team and harness technology to streamline litigation processes.

The work is varied – some days you’ll be drafting court documents, such as affidavits or applications, and other days will see you preparing research summaries that will give you a greater understanding of a point of law. You will also be engaging in ‘discovery’ – which is reviewing client documents and looking for evidence for our case. Our clerks are regularly in contact with clients, barristers and other lawyers.

Juniors work with lawyers of all levels in the litigation team, including working directly with their supervising partner and collaborating with our senior legal staff to achieve our client’s objectives. Where trial advocacy has been outsourced, we may work with QCs or other external senior counsel.

Tax at Chapman Tripp involves working with big business clients who are leaders in their industries, both nationally and globally. As a result you get to work with international and domestic laws to provide structuring advice in novel areas, engage in some of the biggest disputes in New Zealand, and be involved in something different every day.

The tax team tends to be a little smaller than some other teams at Chapman Tripp. This means you are often the only junior on a file working closely alongside seniors and partners, undertaking legal research, discussing your view of the law, coming up with solutions and drafting advice.

You work with your own team first and foremost. Depending on the day, you will also work with other practice areas in the firm, in-house lawyers, executives and representatives of the Inland Revenue Department.

The resource management team helps clients with areas of their business that interact with the environment. This includes assisting with consenting applications for major developments or infrastructure and helping clients with questions about environment-related matters. Our team often works with a wide range of experts and technical information, which makes the work fairly cross-disciplinary. Our team provides advisory services, and also dispute resolution services when needed.

We support clients to produce consent applications, which can include a series of technical reports. We also support expert witnesses to draft evidence for hearings.

As part of the team you’ll also help draft legal research memos on environmental matters – these can be incredibly interesting – prepare submissions for clients on consent applications, plan changes and new plans, prepare court documents where a matter goes to a hearing, and advise on new and upcoming legislation and policy.

Juniors generally work with others in the resource management team, but there are opportunities to meet and have calls with clients, including major New Zealand companies which all operate in different environments. We also work with other internal teams, including supporting the corporate and property teams for due diligence matters.

All of our clients have funding requirements and this is where the finance team comes into play. The team works in debt capital markets in New Zealand and overseas, project financing including some major crown infrastructure projects, corporate lending and borrowing, consumer lending, and restructuring and insolvency.

There is scope to get involved across all areas of the team – whether it’s debt capital markets, corporate lending or restructuring and insolvency. You’ll work on corporate authorisations (resolutions needed for companies to enter transactions), PPSR searches and drafting legal opinions as well as a variety of other legal drafting specific to the transaction. You also get to communicate directly with the client including working closely with most major banks in New Zealand, the Treasury and a variety of corporates and market leading issuers of financial products.

You’ll deal directly with clients quite a bit at a junior level in the finance team. The partners place a large amount of trust in you to manage aspects of a transaction and take responsibility for it, while still being available for the inevitable questions you will have. The finance team also works with other firms both in New Zealand and overseas on a regular basis – some knowledge of time zones can come in handy!

We help large companies with any legal issues relating to the day-to-day operations of their business, or if they need legal advice on large-scale transactions. We work in “sub-teams”: mergers and acquisitions, equity capital markets, and general corporate advisory. Our clients include New Zealand’s largest corporates, often listed companies, such as Vector, Mercury, ANZ, BNZ, Microsoft, Fonterra, Augusta Capital and AMP. During large transactions we work a lot alongside other professional services such as accounting and investment banks.

You’ll work on a variety of different documents including drafting and reviewing sale and purchase agreements, IPO offer documents, takeover documents, board resolutions, or statutory compliance docs…to name a few. As a junior, we do a lot of due diligence (reviewing legal material) for the sale/purchase of different businesses.

On the advisory side, juniors deal directly with clients (and opposing lawyers) to negotiate business-as-usual contracts – which is awesome exposure! With some clients, we run drop-in clinics where juniors go out to their premises once a week to answer legal questions. In more transactional teams, you’ll be working with other team members (both in corporate and other teams like tax, property or resource management) and working closely with partners.

The private client team advises high net worth individuals and families. Most of our work is related to trusts but we also advise more generally on inter-generation asset planning (including relationship property issues) and a wide variety of other work that our clients need help with. This extends into corporate and property-related work in respect of our clients’ interests and we work closely with our colleagues in the corporate, property, resource management and tax teams. We also work with a number of charitable trusts and incorporated societies, a good portion of which is pro-bono. We commonly review and update the trust deeds or rules of existing charities. We also establish new charities which involves drafting new trust deeds or rules and assisting with applying to the Department of Internal Affairs to become a registered charity.

As a junior, you will draft trust documents, for example to establish a trust, vary the terms of a trust, appoint or replace a trustee or resettle the assets of a trust onto a new trust. Preparing wills, enduring powers of attorney and letters of wishes are also day-to-day tasks you will be working on. You will also be asked to research issues of law (often in respect of trusts and other equitable principles but including issues as wide ranging as relationship property questions, mental capacity issues and questions related to wills and estates), and prepare drafts of advice to clients. These are developing areas of the law at present, both in terms of legislative reform and case law, and this is a challenging and interesting field.

Week to week I have direct contact with clients. For some of our significant clients, I will contact their staff who work at their Family Office. I often liaise with clients’ accountants and tax advisers. Internally, there is a lot of scope for direct contact with senior team members and you can expect to have direct contact with people from all levels within the team.

We work a lot with the property team, tax team and sometimes the litigation team. For example, if our clients are wanting to sell our purchase property, whether that be individually or through their trust, we may need the property teams assistance. The tax team provide us with advice when we are working with trusts to make sure we are meeting compliance obligations. The litigation team is sometimes necessary if cases progress beyond what our team can manage and are to be heard in court.

The Construction team works on a wide variety of work – from the beginning of a project phase, through to completion and beyond. We advise a range of clients on a large array of projects, both nationally and globally. We act for central and local government entities, private developers, contractors, consultants and project lenders. The projects we assist with range from residential through to large multi-million dollar developments.

As a junior in the construction team, you’ll be exposed to a huge range of interesting work from the outset. Your work will include assisting with drafting and reviewing construction contracts, identifying potential risks facing our clients, assisting with due diligence, doing research and problem solving for disputes throughout the contract phase.

As part of the construction team you will work most closely with the wider property team on a day to day basis. You will also work with other teams across the firm on various matters, such as the finance team on larger contracts which involve project finance arrangements. As a junior, you’ll have a lot of interaction and support from your supervising partner along with the rest of the team. Our collaborative approach is a really efficient way to learn about best practice and get a grasp on the type of work that we do. You will also be given a lot of client interaction early on, with seniors in the team helping you build strong client relations by encouraging you to attend meetings and have regular communication with clients from the outset.

E anga whakamua ana te waka (Forging a new path)

Te Waka Ture, our Māori Legal Group, specialises in providing commercial legal advice to iwi, hapū, Māori landowners, Māori businesses, and those looking to work with them, focusing specifically on:

• post-Treaty settlement transactions
• joint ventures, and
• collective iwi arrangements.

The Māori economy is growing rapidly as a result of the creation of large, asset-rich Māori corporates from Treaty of Waitangi settlements, and with the development of partnerships and joint ventures with Māori and non-Māori partners.

By drawing on our expertise and experience, our core team of iwi-focused lawyers can assist iwi and Māori organisations to maximise their commercial assets, helping them to achieve not only their commercial objectives, but providing a means to achieve their social and cultural objectives as well.

Te Waka Ture involves members from several different teams across our Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch offices. Being a member of Te Waka Ture allows you to be involved in several areas of work beyond your standard practice area, and deal with unique and interesting Māori legal issues. Some areas you might be involved in if you are a member of Te Waka Ture include Corporate, Resource Management, Property, Tax and Litigation.