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Australia government-owned power company Horizon Power has been involved in a number of significant deals over recent years, supported all the way by the expertise of its legal team. General counsel Frank van der Kooy details some of these innovative projects: ‘Among others, our Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) Project involved the rollout of 47,000 advanced meters across 2.3 million kilometres of regional and remote terrain, and won the “Best Value AMI” award at last year’s Australian Energy Week. As well as this, we supported the Onslow Power Project; this will be Australia’s largest distributed energy microgrid, creating a new era of energy competition and efficiency for residential households and businesses within the region’. The legal team has managed to contribute to this success through a relentless focus on a cooperative internal culture. ‘This culture develops with a sharp focus on delivering legal support of a high standard within the required timeframes while understanding the legislative and industry context within which Horizon Power operates’, van der Kooy explains. Alongside this, the team is exceptionally well-stocked with legal talent, as van der Kooy describes: ‘All lawyers in the team were previously senior associates in the corporate teams of large national law firms and have applied the same focus on client service learned at these firms in an in-house context, with the clients now being our colleagues at Horizon Power’. The Horizon Power legal team’s approach to tackling disputes has had significant positive knock-on effects for the business as a whole. The strategy has changed in two principal ways, says van der Kooy. ‘First’, he outlines, ‘the legal team has taken a more robust approach to disputes where the business is in a strong technical and legal position – working closely with the executive and the audit and risk management committee in order to achieve this. Second, the team significantly redrafted Horizon Power’s template agreements to make them more reflective of standard commercial and industry terms’. Horizon Power’s legal function has therefore combined an effective team culture with strong technical legal skills in order to innovate and add real value to the company as a whole, successfully achieving their overall objectives as an in-house legal team in the process.