Energy lawyers experience record boom as renewables transition takes hold

Explosion of green tape under new energy reforms sparks race between top law firms to hire energy transition lawyers.

Baker McKenzie’s newly formed renewable energy legal team, from left: Emanuel Confos, Rita Lahoud, Sarah Melville, Abinayaa Kumaranathan, Harriet Oldmeadow, Lucy O’Brien, Annabel Morton, Anne-Marie Allgrove, Indiana Tappin and Sabrina Sharpe. Picture: Jane Dempster

An explosion of green tape under the Albanese government’s energy reforms has sparked a race between top law firms to hire energy transition and construction lawyers, with one international firm poaching a full nine-person team from a rival practice.

As top-tier law firm Baker McKenzie acquires a whole team of partners, associates and paralegals from competing practice Norton Rose Fulbright, lawyers across the country are taking on mammoth caseloads, hiring in record droves, and paying high sums for top quality talent who are across the growing number environmental and energy matters.

When Anthony Albanese at the G20 Summit committed to tripling Australia’s renewable energy technology capacity, and a global emissions peak by 2025, lawyers were keenly listening in.

Newly appointed Baker McKenzie construction boss Emanuel Confos told The Australian the interest in the renewables sector had increased at an incredible pace, to the point that “everybody wants to get a piece of the energy market”.

“This is a booming industry. In the same way any industry booms, there are people out there making a lot of money,” said Mr Confos, who has more that 20 years experience in the fast-growing energy and renewables sector.

“There is getting approvals to build a solar farm, getting an offtake agreement to sell the electricity, package it up and sell it on. This is a big industry gain.”

Mr Confos said when the first large scale solar farm was built in Australia in 2010, “no one was really interested”.

“Now, every place I go, people want to hear about energy work,” he said. “It is at the forefront of everything. The stockmarket is interested, investment houses are interested. Everyone wants to get a piece of the energy market.”

Since Labor has come to power, the government has legislated Australia’s 2030 emissions reduction target as 43 per cent below the 2005 level, and are targeting net-zero emissions by 2050.

The government also introduced a safeguard mechanism to force the nation’s 215 biggest-emitting facilities to cut nearly 5 per cent of their emissions each year until the end of the decade.

Baker McKenzie partner Aylin Cunsolo said federal government policies were boosting work levels across both the public and private sector. “It’s a policy decision to achieve net-zero emissions, and that is a policy decision both at a government level but also at the private sector level. Part of that is driven by global targets, as well as shareholder pressure,” she said.

Ms Cunsolo said the firm had landed deals with major brands such as Aldi and Fujitsu to assist in securing power purchase agreements that allow the companies to contract directly with a renewable energy project to acquire electricity and green products.

Her colleague, energy partner Harriet Oldmeadow, agreed, saying community expectations had contributed to the booming market. “In Australia, there is 100 per cent an expectation that we turn ourselves to net zero,” she said.

“One of the most critical things for our clients … is ESG (environmental, social, and governance) and advising clients on how they meet their ESG (targets).”

Pinsent Masons construction partner Rob Buchanan told The Australian there would be an international shortage of energy transition, construction and infrastructure lawyers as the sector continued to heat up.

“The level of work in Australia in the infrastructure space – including energy and road infrastructure – has resulted in lawyers like that becoming more sought after and attracting better salaries,” he said. “I think globally there is going to be a shortage of high-quality lawyers that service the energy community.”

Mr Buchanan said the bulk of the work coming from the public sector related to issues with network transition as coal-fired stations power down and clean energy gears up.

“In Australia, we’ve seen the initial wave of solar and wind go in, and it’s become apparent because Australian is much bigger and the population density is lower and a lot of these installations are going in the middle of nowhere, and so we’ve seen a lot of novel problems come out of that,” he said.

“The main one is the problem with our transmission network which was designed to hold stable, coal-power generated electricity with no variations.”

Herbert Smith Freehills partner Nick Baker said there is an “incredible demand at the moment for people with deep energy sector experience.”

“We have seen a significant increase in energy work coming from all parts of sector. Renewables remains hot while energy security and storage related transactions and issues have emerged and are dominating headlines,” he said.

“These trends are driving M&A, project development, environment and planning, social licence, and disputes work, although finance is slower to take off.”

Norton Rose Fulbright chief Alison Deitz said the firm had bolstered its team to handle the incoming influx of energy transition matters across the public and private sectors.

“We advise global majors, local utilities, renewables developers, investors and major energy users. We are also an advisor on energy transition projects at all levels of government across gas, power, renewables and hydrogen,” she said.

“For example, our firm is acting for the Victorian Government on its recently announced deal with AGL to decommission its 2.2 GW Loy Yang A power station in 2035.

“Last month we added to our energy and projects capability in Sydney, with new partner Glen Warwick and his team joining from Clyde & Co. Earlier in the year we also added new partners Daniel Allman (disputes) in Sydney and Ben Bradstreet (projects and energy) in Perth.”