About

Having doubled the size of the team over the past two years, senior vice president legal and general counsel of Brookfield Property Partners Claire Bibby oversees a team of high quality professionals dedicated to advising the Sydney based property company in a ‘collaborative nature, with a supportive team structure and innovative style’. Comprised of ten members in total, eight of whom are lawyers, the team can list numerous legal solutions to complex cases over multiple jurisdictions in the recent past, including (but not limited to) one of the ‘largest property transactions in Victoria as well as the biggest office deal in Sydney in recent years’. The team was also instrumental in a recent key achievement for the business in the form of a landmark transaction: Brookfield was awarded recognition as a “State Significant Development Approval” under New South Wales planning laws for a $1.6bn AUD development for Wynyard Place. The team, Bibby says, had ‘intense involvement [and] saw us negotiating with, and project managing, multiple counter parties in a project that will redefine Sydney’s centre and which has set new precedents for transacting with Government.’ Committed to having a positive effect not only on the Brookfield business but the wider in-house legal environment, Bibby notes her team’s strong ethical positions, claiming the team takes a leading role ‘in the in-house space in responding to Tristan Jepson Memorial Foundation guidelines’. Said guidelines are dedicated to building towards ‘psychologically healthy workspaces for in-house lawyers’, therefore displaying the team’s true commitment to bettering the quality of life in the profession as a whole. This position as one of Australia’s premier in-house legal teams is confirmed by their presence at the forefront of the industry conversations not just in the aforementioned topics but also being one of the nine founding Australian in-house legal teams of “CLOC” (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium), an international organisation consisting of legal professionals sharing best practices, networking and driving positive change across the corporate legal ecosystem.