The Lavan Oil & Gas team has experience in all aspects of the domestic gas industry, both onshore and offshore. This includes major petroleum projects, corporate acquisitions and divestments, farm-out and farm-in agreements, joint ventures and joint operating agreements, project management documentation and dispute resolution.
Our team brings a clear understanding of legal and commercial concerns when negotiating, drafting and implementing all types of documentation.
We provide advice on and draft contracts to suit the particular needs of our clients’ projects. These include drafting suites of contracts and ongoing advice for construction works contracts, early contractor involvement; drafting and negotiating EPC and O&M contracts; and drafting and advice on EPC Heads of Agreement, Technology Purchase Agreements.
Our team are familiar with all major construction contracts in use in Western Australia, having advised contractors on nearly all major projects in Western Australia in the last 5 years. We are also familiar with all standard form contracts (and their derivatives) in use in Western Australia.
We are continuously advising our clients of their contractual rights and obligations. This includes: working with contractors, often in association with programmers (delay analysts), quantity surveyors and other expert engineering and cost consultants, to develop claims. We have built up a good relationship with a number of competent consultants to that end. We also have extensive experience in acting for borrowers and lenders with regard to project and resource related transactions and finance. Our experience includes all aspects of project related due diligence, bankable feasibility studies, negotiations on term sheets and all related finance documentation.
We have accumulated a wealth of experience in drafting and giving commercial advice on a broad range of commercial agreements. We have a good understanding of the regulatory regime applying to petroleum projects (Commonwealth and State), including through acting in relation to numerous joint ventures and joint operating agreements, farm-out and farm-in agreements, state agreements (including production sharing contracts), and other transactions.
Our lawyers regularly advise in relation to parties’ rights and obligations under various types of agreements, including in the context of assisting parties to overcome potential disputes and disagreements.
We recognise that our clients often wish to preserve long term relationships with counter-parties and place great weight on preserving those relationships wherever possible. This requires the sensitive handling of disputes, including judicious wording of claim correspondence.
Whilst we are commercially driven to assist in resolving disputes and disagreements, our commercial and dispute resolution teams are experienced in working together closely where a more formal dispute resolution procedure is implemented.
Lavan has extensive breadth and depth of experience in dispute resolution. Our expertise covers all areas from managing litigation in all courts, from the Magistrates Court to successfully undertaking appeals in the High Court of Australia, and in arbitrations and private mediations.
