Tammi Chau – GC Powerlist
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Australia: Rising Stars 2019

Tammi Chau

Legal head of property | McDonald’s Australia

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Australia: Rising Stars 2019

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Tammi Chau

Legal head of property | McDonald’s Australia

About

Tammi Chau is the legal head of property at McDonald’s Australia, providing legal advice on a range of matters, including overseeing and supporting the national development group (NDG) on all development, design, construction, real estate and planning related-issues and supporting the delivery of new restaurant openings. She joined the company in 2005 as legal counsel and was promoted to senior legal counsel in 2010, before being appointed to her current strategic advisory role in 2018. Recently Chau has worked with Stockland on the redevelopment of McDonald’s Parramatta North restaurant, an exciting new multimillion-dollar urban project. During her time at McDonald’s, some of Chau’s proudest achievements include: the successful insourcing of development legal work which included recruitment and training of five lawyers, all without any previous in-house experience; the creation of a legal induction manual and induction training session for the new lawyers; the successful transitioning of work externally to in-house, and change management within the business, in particular, the NDG. Additionally, she created a set of core standards and guidelines to be used across McDonald’s Australia as well as the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa regions by development lawyers and managers to ensure consistency in decisions and better, longer term outcomes. This has since been rolled out across all McDonald’s markets globally. In Chau’s view, ‘resourcing continues to be the biggest challenge for in-house lawyers. As companies continue to reduce costs, they look for employees to do more with less. This remains so true with lawyers. With continuing reductions on general and administrative expenses and funding, in-house lawyers face the challenge of staying ahead of the game in terms of new technology available in the market and how they can be leveraged to create more efficiencies and support the work being completed in-house’. Talking about the skills she thinks that general counsel of the future will need to successfully advise businesses, she comments: ‘Staying on top of legal changes that are occurring in the industry. General counsel will need to be savvy and move with technology in order to stay relevant and competitive, otherwise they run of the risk of falling behind’.
(After the research deadline passed, Chau moved on to take a role leading Woolworths supermarket developments legal arm.)

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