About

The Future Fund Management Agency (FFMA) was established by the Australian Commonwealth Government in 2006 to invest and administer a series of investment funds, including the Future Fund. The Future Fund itself is a sovereign wealth fund which the Australian Government established to help it meet future public service pension entitlements. The Future Fund is currently valued at approximately $130bn AUD, with other administered funds totalling approximately $20bn AUD. In order to allow it to perform its various roles, the FFMA employs a legal team that targets providing ‘high quality, tailored, strategic, risk aware and commercially relevant legal advice to help drive the organisation’s important investment agenda’ according to deputy general counsel Chris Wilson. A department with eight lawyers and a number of support staff, the team has undergone a recent ‘wide-ranging’ rethink about its role within the company in terms of how it can best add value. New initiatives have been designed that are ‘efficient and risk-aware’ and compliment the team’s other reforms designed to better reflect the challenges posed by a highly competitive and challenging global investment market with complex, time-pressured direct investments. The team is intimately involved in all transactions, including large and complex acquisitions and sales of its investments. The team is also involved early in deliberative processes, working very closely with internal client groups throughout each transaction cycle. The team contains several senior members that are entrusted to co-lead ‘key organisational projects’ that recently included redesigning ‘how the organisation carries out investment implementation at all levels and across all teams, and through contract review processes and a tailored contract register solution.’ With a constant desire to self-improve, the team ‘actively engages with representatives of the broader organisation to garner feedback on the team’s model including the CIO, sector heads and team heads to ensure approaches and strategies are, and remain, appropriately fit-for-purpose’. These relationships extend to senior management also – as described, the team works closely with key decision-makers at the FFMA, with the general counsel Cameron Price reporting directly to the CEO and an additional lawyer acting as the board secretary, whilst the team takes the lead on certain ‘key policy initiatives, stakeholder management, disputes and other key organisational activities.’