About

The legal team for the Australian branch of multinational professional services firm Deloitte is made up of 22 members and is headed by Rachel Besley, the company’s general counsel, board secretary and partner. Each individual in the team is given personal ownership and accountability which has embedded a collaborative spirit. As a result of this, the team are highly engaged with the company’s various divisions, with six of its members selected for high talent fast track programs and two of its members seconded to the Deloitte’s internal strategy function, after impressing senior leadership with their work. Besley says that internal research ‘showed that our manager level (the mid-level for lawyers) was the most innovative group of thinkers across the firm’. The legal team was also instrumental in the establishment of “Deloitte Solutions” – a new venture for Deloitte Australia and cornerstone of its strategy launched in 2017 that licences to clients the intellectual property, tools and assets that power Deloitte’s traditional services. As a significant departure from Deloitte’s traditional business models, ‘the legal team made an impact on the development of the strategy of Deloitte Solutions to ensure it was positioned for maximum success’, according to Besley. Further demonstrating its status within the company, the team is well represented on key management bodies including the I80 (the firm’s top 80 leaders), various boards, the Sydney Leadership team, the Innovation Council and the Qualified Negotiation Network to name a few. Perhaps one of the team’s greatest hallmarks is its capacity for innovation. It helped develop a client-centric relationship approach globally that offers data centric analysis of key market trends through the team’s legal work, introduced and piloted artificial intelligence in the legal team using the product KIRA and built and enhanced a new technology lawyers and business relationships function within the legal team. In terms of assisting Deloitte on transactions, the team led the negotiations for one of Australia’s largest commercial leases at in Melbourne for Deloitte as well as the negotiations for some of Australia’s largest system implementation agreements over the past two years and advised on all aspects of seven key transactions in the past 12 months including deals with Strut Digital and Plenary Networks. Besley highlights her two deputy general counsels as key members in the team. Brooke McDonald leads the team’s corporate and M&A lawyers, is responsible for the Firm’s transactions and ‘sets the standard for the team for high quality client service, and is a strong team player and collaborator.’ Whilst Tala Bennett is described as ‘the queen of the commercial deal – she finds a collaborative way of achieving client outcomes to the benefit of both the firm and its clients’.