Kate Bickford
Kate is a corporate and commercial lawyer with over 20 years’ experience across broad industry cross sectors from football and wine, to resources and mining. Kate is an experienced commercial advisor in all manner of commercial settings. Kate has also developed a specialist land access practice involving native title and Aboriginal heritage agreements for resources, energy and infrastructure proponents across the country. Kate specializes in risk advice, statutory compliance, administrative law, corporate governance and agreement making within sometimes complex cross- cultural settings.
Kate has secured numerous agreements for major infrastructure, mining and exploration projects, including various associated Ministerial approvals and court orders. Kate’s more recent work has involved agreement making on native title compensation. Kate combines her commercial technical legal expertise with her knowledge of cross-cultural matters, to achieve sustainable outcomes. Kate has valuable working relationships with many Aboriginal communities, associated government agencies and native title representative bodies.
Kate has represented clients in the Federal Court of Australia, National Native Title Tribunal, South Australia’s Environment, Resources and Development Court and the Supreme Court of South Australia.
Kate was recently recognised as “Lawyer of the Year” for Mining Law in 2021, and Native Title in 2020, by Best LawyersTM Australia and has also been recognised in Doyle’s Guide to the Australian Legal Profession since 2017.
Experience
Kate’s experience includes advising:
- An electricity transmission entity on access approvals for construction of a $300m electricity transmission project;
- An ASX listed resources company on the development of a $2.6b infrastructure project for urea production;
- Major Australian exploration and mining companies on State government Ministerial authorisations and departmental approvals;
- A major energy entity on their native title compensation agreements;
- Exploration and mining entities on judicial review actions to secure project authorisations; and
- A private port on its infrastructure development.