About

Jake Elsworthy is a managing counsel at leading global resources company BHP. In this role, Elsworthy provides legal support for strategic commercial activities and transformational projects across BHP’s Australian businesses, including iron ore, copper and coal assets. His key areas of practice include material procurement and commercial contracting, regulatory and emerging risks, M&A, competition, WHS, joint venture issues, and logistics. He joined BHP in 2015 after spending four years in private practice at Herbert Smith Freehills, where he obtained deep experience in a broad range of corporate, mining, and infrastructure matters. Recently Elsworthy has successfully completed a two-month secondment to BHP’s legal team in Chile. ‘Being able to provide legal support in a foreign country without speaking the native language was a great personal challenge. The secondment was an excellent development opportunity for me and illustrates one of the benefits of working as part of a global team’, he says. As managing counsel, Elsworthy has been working on some interesting projects for BHP. Following BHP’s successful roll-out of its first fully autonomous haul truck fleet at Jimblebar Mine in late 2017, it is now assessing the opportunity to expand the implementation of autonomous haulage across its Australian open-cut iron ore and coal operations. ‘I am the legal lead on the study team. Working on a multijurisdictional automation study is exciting because of the novel issues and challenges it presents, particularly against an evolving legal and regulatory landscape’, he comments. In addition, Elsworthy has a lead role in the development and roll out of BHP legal’s “operating system”, a key transformation initiative for the legal function. According to Elsworthy, ‘once established, the system will include BHP legal’s core standards, processes, and resources, along with a global continuous improvement framework that enables all legal team members to continually pursue new and innovative methods for delivering work. The operating system roll-out will see the full legal team trained in a variety of project management principles and techniques, including lean, design thinking, agile, project management, and legal project management. It is exciting to have a lead role in a project that stimulates challenges to conventional ways of working and that will deliver new and broader skills across the legal team’. Elsworthy feels that technology will cause constant change for in-house counsels. ‘The ongoing emergence of new technology in society, for example, automation, will continue to change the backdrop against which legal advice is provided, giving rise to new and thought-provoking legal and ethical issues. It will also cause changes to the way legal-teams operate, the types of work being carried out by in-house counsel and, consequently, the core skills required of in-house counsel’, he says. Additionally, ‘changing community expectations regarding the role of companies and businesses in society will also have a significant influence on the role of lawyers’, he continues, ‘as the question for in-house teams shifts from “can we do this” to “should we do it” (and “how do we do it”), so too does the required analysis and skill-set’. In Elsworthy’s view, it will continue to be essential for general counsels to have a deep understanding of the broader context in which their businesses operate. Being able to look beyond the ‘black-letter’ law will be core to delivering fit-for-purpose, strategic advice and assisting businesses achieve long-term value. ‘Moving away from old solutions and learning from other teams (internal and external) and industries will be key to meeting the ongoing drive for in-house teams to do more with less. It will also be a fundamental contributor to creating an exciting work environment’, he states.