How we work with clients

Catalyst Committee

Catalyst is a group of young professionals at MinterEllison who support the Innovation Council. They do this by facilitating events within the firm to promote a culture of innovation, leading innovation projects, and sharing the innovation message.

In the past year, the Catalyst Committee has formed and:

• presented their insights to the Innovation Council - providing a welcome diversity of perspective.
• collaborated with senior representatives, including the firm's Innovation Leader and an external IT provider, to create, develop and test MinterEllison's new innovation collaboration platform called “WeThink” which Catalyst now curates.

Our consulting offering

Clients have told us they are looking for seamlessly integrated legal and consulting services. In response, and to support our ambition of being our clients' best partner, we've made changes to our business model.

During this financial year, we've expanded the firm's suite of offerings to our clients to include technology consultancy firm ITNewcom, and the pay governance expertise of Board and Executive Remuneration (BER) consulting services.

ITNewcom acquisition

ITNewcom has a 20 year track record providing strategic advice and risk assurance consulting services to clients entering into large IT and technology outsourcing projects.

In a first for the legal sector, our combined team gives clients the ability to access seamless end-to-end consulting and legal solutions to achieve sophisticated IT and technology outcomes with lower risk, greater efficiency and simplified project management.

Board and Executive Remuneration

The acquisition of the Board and Executive Remuneration team was the first 'cab off the rank' in building our suite of non-legal advisory services for clients.

The team’s board and executive remuneration governance consulting expertise broadens and strengthens the support the firm has traditionally provided to Boards and CEOs of national and international clients through our corporate, tax and employment practices.

Case study

MinterEllison Remuneration Governance Team helps CSL avoid Strike Two

MinterEllison's Remuneration Governance team were approached by CSL to advise them on improving executive pay design and governance, gaining better alignment between shareholders and executives, and enhancing investor support – all to be achieved prior to the October 2017 AGM.

To deliver to this deadline, MinterEllison worked alongside the CSL Remuneration Committee, Board members, and Human Resources team.

The only companies listed on the ASX with market capitalisation greater than CSL are BHP and the Big 4 banks. At the October 2016 AGM, more than 25% of shareholders voted on the resolution to adopt the Remuneration Report were against. CSL had just received its first ever strike and did not want a second, that would require putting a board spill motion to shareholders.

Australia's 'two strikes' rule, is of interest because although 'say on pay' legislation has been introduced in several countries, Australia's version is unique as it gives shareholders the right to spill the board while not requiring a binding vote on pay.

Flex

MinterEllison Flex is our fully integrated, on-demand contract lawyer business, giving our clients and their in-house legal teams the confidence to be agile.

In FY17, Flex has grown to become a leading provider of top tier legal talent using this model. Our national pool of top tier talented lawyers continues to grow - both in diversity of capability as well as experience.

The extraordinary growth achieved by Flex in its first full year of operation is testament of the value it provides our clients.

Genworth chooses MinterEllison Flex

When one of their lawyers headed off on parental leave, it seemed the perfect opportunity for Genworth to try MinterEllison's Flex program.

Prudence Milne, Genworth General Counsel and Company Secretary, talks about Genworth's experience with one of our Flex lawyers, Lara James.

We regularly use MinterEllison for legal advice, particularly around employment law and one of the partners we work with suggested we take a look at Flex.

In the past we have used secondees, so this was something quite different and we were curious to see how it worked. We got in touch with MinterEllison, sent over our job requirements, and almost immediately they came back to us with lawyers they thought would fit us.

Lara, our Flex lawyer has worked in both private practice and in-house, and had the right litigation, process issues, and customer contracts and resourcing procurement experience. She’s a fantastic lawyer, and the whole process has been a seamless, pleasurable experience.

In using a Flex lawyer, you know they have the support of a large leading firm behind them. We are also able to dial up and dial down the services as needed, and that flexibility is very convenient. 

Empower

MinterEllison’s Empower program enables our people to positively disrupt and innovate their work skills and practices to enhance the firm's offering.

In doing so, the program develops opportunities for growth of our practice areas by encouraging our people to deepen their understanding of the challenges facing our clients.

Since the introduction of the program we have seen an increase our people working at client sites and enhanced relationships.

We spoke to MinterEllison associate Ryan Davis about how Empower has enabled him to deliver better client solutions and build stronger relationships.

Safetrac

MinterEllison’s online compliance training solution, the Safetrac Group, provides innovative and intuitive governance, legal risk and compliance management software solutions to an international client base.

Safetrac has experienced significant growth and development over the past year.

In partnership with its clients, Safetrac was awarded:

• Platinum for Best Compliance Training Program in the Asia Pacific region at the annual LearnX Impact Awards Asia Pacific 2017 – with Salmat Limited, for the delivery of a complete compliance training suite to Salmat's entire workforce within Australia and overseas. This the seventh year in a row that Safetrac has received this award.
• Platinum for Best Workplace Health and Safety Courseware – with Museums Victoria, for creating a bespoke training module on workplace safety that focused on handling hazardous substances within the Museum's vast artefacts collections.
• Gold for Best Bitesize Learning Design – with Australian Unity Limited, for creating a bespoke Aged Care-specific compliance training suite.

The group has also noted:

• a 20% growth in its renewal business - its highest ever.
• a 6% attrition rate of existing clients – the lowest in seven years.

And has:

• released the new Boardtrac Plus application - a secure document dissemination tool used by boards and others groups looking to distribute highly confidential documents in a secure manner to verified users.
• significantly expanded the types of courses offered to 92. This includes three different versions of our core courses.
• continued attracting significant big brand clients including AON, Salmat, Coles, Museum Victoria, Contiki, Kinetik Super, Qualitas & Samsonite.
• continued strong growth in custom development services and built custom courseware for significant clients including Air New Zealand, Coles, Museum Victoria and the Bank of New Zealand.

Bespoke module offers WHS education & assessment for Museums VIC 

After the build of the module, the course was distributed internally to Museum Victoria staff, and was ready for deployment in the client's learning management system (LMS). The course was well received, with feedback praising the online functionality after years of handbooks and classroom training.

Externally, the course has been recognised by the LearnX foundation, Asia Pacific's leading awards for e-Learning content, winning the Platinum award for Best Safety Course in 2017.

Design Thinking

Coders Collective

MinterEllison's innovation agenda is focused on developing firm‑wide innovation capability and culture.

Formed in late 2016, the Coders Collective aims at fostering IT innovation, incubating ideas for technology driven solutions, and ultimately developing some great legal apps within the firm.

In this age of Artificial Intelligence and increased automation of tasks, it is important for lawyers to be familiar with new requirements and client expectations, including being able to code.

Over the course of FY17, members of the Coders Collective have worked on, and showcased, various projects that automate tasks including:

Creating the Definition Checker app

During the course of FY17, our coders developed a new app – the Definition Checker.

This timesaving app is an add-in to Microsoft Word and checks a document for problems with its use of definitions, while also providing quick access to definitions and where they are used.

It is particularly useful for contracts, advices and prospectuses. In future versions, Definition Checker will be able to identify cases and legislation and link to Austlii.

The creation of this app allows the firm to streamline delivery of high quality contracts to our clients by reducing inadvertent errors in large documents, and the time needed in checking them.