Planning & development

Overview

Planning and development law plays a critical role in shaping the built environment, ensuring that projects comply with regulatory frameworks while balancing the interests of developers, communities, and governments. Our Planning Government Infrastructure & Environment group's strategic and tactical advice has contributed to major projects achieving commercial success, particularly for major retail, commercial, educational, residential, tourism and industrial resource projects. 

Our team members work closely with our client's matters to identify problems, mitigate risks, and provide solutions that, where possible, avoid litigation. Where litigation is required, we are not just a post box dispatching matters into litigation. We are instead hands-on across the different aspects of modern planning litigation and bring incisive and critical thinking to the table in order to ensure our client's best interests are served.

Our group's expertise is regularly called on by development corporations to resolve complex planning and development disputes and by governments to prepare policy and legal instruments to avoid such disputes. Where a dispute is unavoidable, we represent clients in superior courts and tribunals, the Federal Court of Australia and various state planning and environment courts. 

Our group regularly advises on planning and development matters, including:

• administrative and heritage law matters
• compulsory acquisition, compensation and easements
• development approvals, consents, licences and contributions
• development and project assessment, management and rezoning
• development litigation, mediation and dispute resolution
• due diligence investigations
• major projects and planning agreements
• planning and development instruments, legislation and policy.
• land access issues for landlocked sites, access rights for rock anchors and cranes, and dealing with covenants
• compliance with the Design and Building Practitioners Act 2020 (NSW)

Our group has helped resolve planning and development disputes involving many major projects, including:

• master planned residential communities
• high-rise residential and mixed-use developments
• commercial and industrial developments
• major school and university redevelopments
• agriculture developments
• community infrastructure
• development by faith based enterprises
• mineral unloading facilities in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park
• mines and extractive industries.