Hive Legal has advised Origin Energy on the sale by competitive bid process of its ‘Acumen’ smart metering business to intelliHUB, a company to be jointly owned by Pacific Equity Partners and Landis+Gyr.

Hive’s role on the sale process included providing advice on business and sale structure, regulatory and data issues, evaluation of bids and preparation and negotiation of the suite of transaction documents. This included assisting Origin to prepare and negotiate a suite of long-term metering service agreements which were signed as part of the overall transaction.

Hive’s team is excited to have acted on these arrangements. They represent a significant development in the competitive metering market in Australia’s National Electricity Market, following major metering regulatory reforms which came into effect in December 2017.

The Hive team was led by Principals Jeremy Snow, Andrew Brookes and Joanna Green.

Hive Legal has assisted Risen Energy, a relatively new entrant into the Australian renewables energy sector with its aggressive growth program and the acquisition of the Yarranlea 121MW solar farm development in Queensland. Hive’s role included advising on documentation for the acquisition, a range of complex regulatory issues, network connection arrangements and FIRB approval. ‘Risen has appreciated Hive’s innovative approach to the transaction including the use of software to stream line processes. The fixed fees and innovative pricing options offered by Hive provides real certainty without the prospect of ever increasing hourly rates’ commented a spokesperson for Risen Energy.

Hive Legal’s Mitzi Gilligan and Andrew Brookes provided specialist gas contracting expertise to QIC on its $1.78 billion acquisition of the Iona Gas Storage facility from Energy Australia. The Iona facility is now operated by Lochard Energy and is used by major energy companies to manage their gas supply and plays an important role in the Victorian gas market. The legal and commercial aspects of transaction were highly complex, multi-faceted and required a deep understanding of the East Coast gas market.

Hive was engaged to advise QIC on the negotiation and documentation of the foundation contract that underpinned the acquisition. We performed that role alongside QIC’s other main legal adviser for the broader transaction, King & Wood Mallesons, working collaboratively to ensure that the legal aspects of the transaction were managed seamlessly and effectively and taking advantage of the combined capacity and respective skill sets of each firm’s team.

Hive is also providing ongoing legal advice to Lochard Energy.

Hive Legal has continued to assist ASX listed QMS Media Limited with its fast moving strategic growth agenda by advising on its successful purchase of leading New Zealand outdoor media company, iSite Limited, from Infratil Limited and on a number of other domestic and cross border acquisitions and associated capital raisings.

This successful strategy has seen QMS Limited move its market capitalisation from A$90m to more than $400m over 2015/16.

Hive Legal’s Principals, Peter Monk (M&A stream lead) and Simon Davidson (capital raising lead), supported by members of Hive’s Melbourne team and network specialists in Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong, combined to deliver the transactions on a fixed price, non-time costed basis for the complex cross border transactions.

‘We’ve had a busy year with QMS Media, advising on their pre-IPO M&A roll up acquisitions, their very successful IPO and now on the NZ acquisition and capital raising that catapults QMS Media into the ASX300’ said Peter Monk. ‘In the life of a corporate practitioner, there are few things more rewarding than travelling a client’s full journey with them. We celebrate QMS’ success and look forward to helping them write their next chapter.’

‘We work in an extremely fast changing industry and we need our advisers to move quickly with us. Hive Legal’s progressive and highly commercial approach to legal services, including the ability to get us the best team and provide us with price certainty makes our strategic growth agenda all the more easy to execute’, said David Edmonds, Director Corporate & Legal, QMS Media.

From the establishment of Hive Legal,  Simon Davidson, Principal, has been engaged by a number of Australian based healthcare and life sciences companies on equity capital markets work such as IPOs (ASX and NASDAQ) and private and public secondary capital raisings, as well redomiciles and restructures to facilitate the growth of these companies. The feedback is that clients in this sector are seeing real benefit in using innovative legal models for this work.

Developing life sciences companies are reliant on progressing one step at a time and legal cost certainty and risk sharing is very important to them. Hive Legal scopes the work carefully with the client in order to manage and focus the legal work to allow a true value price proposition for the client.

Most recently Hive Legal (Simon Davidson, Rohila Rahimi, Associate, and Mathika Perera, Lawyer) assisted biotech company AdAlta Limited on its successful IPO and listing on the ASX. AdAlta has a unique platform technology which it is applying to its first drug development candidate to treat fibrosis, a large unmet medical need. AdAlta closed its oversubscribed AU$10 million IPO on ASX following strong support from investors, including a number of leading investment funds and existing shareholders.

The company will use the funds to complete the first phase of a clinical study to validate its lead candidate drug (AD-114) which was developed based on AdAlta’s novel technology platform that produces human proteins which mimic the shape of shark antibodies and engineers their key antigen binding and stability features to create unique compounds, known as i- bodies, for therapeutic intervention in disease.

‘Working with Simon, right from the start, meant that we had a clear line of sight on the legal process and the resources and costs needed to achieve the listing. That clarity is particularly important for biotech companies like ours as we work through the steps on our drug development journey.’ Sam Cobb, CEO, AdAlta

Hive Legal has assisted QMS Media Limited, a fast growing outdoor digital media company specialising in large format digital billboards, on its recent transformative transactions including an IPO funded MBO and four other roll-up acquisitions. The contemporaneous acquisition transactions alongside an IPO process required extensive team management for acquisition due diligence, and for disclosure in the prospectus.

We collaborated with approximately 10 law firms across various jurisdictions with our flexible resourcing network allowing us to add additional resources to manage the multiple acquisitions alongside the IPO work. Essentially we were able to flex our resources up and down, as required, for the transactions to QMS Media’s needs.

As a result of this flexibility, QMS Media noticed real benefits, and differences, in the way that Hive Legal worked compared to traditional methods. “Their agility and ability to appropriately resource and manage the legal aspects of this transaction, combined with their extensive corporate expertise and experience, made a challenging journey significantly simpler for us” David Edmonds, Director Corporate & Legal, QMS Media

Like us, QMS Media are relatively new to the market and it has been extremely satisfying to be part of bringing a fresh player into the out of home advertising industry.

Hive Legal assisted CSL Limited in acquiring the global rights to manufacture and commercialise RAPIVAB – an approved influenza treatment.

This represents a long term deal for the addition of an important product to the bioCSL (a CSL subsidiary) stable, and involved navigation through novel manufacturing and regulatory arrangements in addition to complex licensing matters.

We were able to offer senior, consistent resourcing with the expertise to become involved at short notice on an intensive and important transaction for the business.

The fixed fee and ‘single point of contact’ arrangement meant that general support could be offered in a collaborative and valuable way, leading to a great working relationship and outcome.

The privatisation of Medibank, Australia’s largest private health insurer, was one of the most significant IPOs in Australia in recent times.

Working alongside King & Wood Mallesons, Hive Legal provided Medibank with highly specialist regulatory and private health insurance industry advice vital to the success of the privatisation.

Our progressive approach gave Medibank the flexibility to identify and use important skills and expertise it needed for the IPO. This is a trend we will see more as organisations look for innovative and efficient ways to work with their legal advisers across multiple firms to best achieve their outcomes.

Hive Legal assisted Nexvet, a pioneering Australian veterinary biologic drug developer, with its recent global expansion strategy. This included a private placement to US institutional shareholders, its redomicile to Ireland and subsequent IPO on the NASDAQ.

We worked with Nexvet to facilitate these complicated transactions by providing greater access to skilled experienced lawyers throughout the process which is critical for identifying and resolving issues quickly.

“These transactions were designed to advantageously position the company as it undergoes a global expansion. They were large projects which required rapid analysis and execution of several jurisdictional challenges, and Hive’s expertise was invaluable in navigating these waters.” Geraldine Farrell, Vice-President Operations and General Counsel for Nexvet.