Agreement Making
Stakeholder negotiation and agreement making for projects that need consent before they need a contract. We convene the negotiation, earn the trust it depends on, and leave the parties with an agreement that holds long after it is signed.
Before there is a dispute
Most stakeholder agreements are negotiated under time pressure by people who will never meet again. A proponent arrives with a draft instrument and an approval deadline; the landholder, the community or the native title party experiences that as a process run over the top of them. Something usually gets signed. What rarely gets built is any sense on the other side that the agreement is theirs.
An agreement nobody owns is renegotiated the moment conditions change — a new general manager, an expanded footprint, a dry season, a change of council. The signature closed the file; it did not settle anything.
What we do instead
Equipoise is engaged before the negotiation starts, not after it fails. We begin on the stakeholder side of the table and spend the first stage of the engagement understanding what the project actually changes for the people living alongside it. Only then do the parties convene. The commercial terms come last, tested against objective criteria rather than against who has more leverage.
The outcome is an agreement both sides helped build, documented to bind and to survive the staff turnover that undoes most project relationships — and a working relationship you can go back to when the next approval comes around.
Who engages us — and the capacity we act in
Agreement making is engaged by the proponent, and in this service we act for you. We negotiate directly with the landholders, Traditional Owners, regulators and communities whose agreement the project depends on, and we say plainly which side of the table we sit on. Where a matter calls for a neutral instead, that is our dispute resolution service, and we never do both on the same matter.
Acting for you is not the same as arguing for you. A landholder or a Native Title party can tell within a meeting whether they are being negotiated with or processed, and an agreement reached through a process they trusted is the one they will keep through renewal, variation and expansion. That is the difference between a negotiator who has sat on the operator’s side of the table and a litigator sent to win.
The capacity we are engaged in is recorded in writing before work begins, and it is subject to conflict and capacity checks. Where we could not act for you cleanly, we say so before accepting the engagement rather than after.
The same six stages.
Agreement making runs on the Social Licence Resolution framework — the same six-stage method we use to resolve disputes, applied before one exists. Built on principled negotiation. Acting for you, we negotiate directly with the parties whose agreement you need.
Set out the legal framework
Anchor both sides in what happens if talks fail.
Listen
Substantive negotiation begins on the stakeholder side; trust is earned before any commercial term is on the table.
Convene
Both parties in a shared room under ground rules that neutralise the adversarial frame.
Reframe
Positions become interests; interests become options; the unwinnable argument becomes a shared problem.
Negotiate
Principled negotiation anchored in objective criteria, with each option tested against the courtroom alternative.
Document
Agreements drafted to bind, to last, and to survive the staff turnover that defines most projects.
The stage that matters most here is the first one. Agreement making that opens with a commercial offer is how a negotiation becomes a bidding contest; setting out the legal framework first tells both sides what happens if no agreement is reached, which is the only honest measure of what is then put on the table.
The framework is set out in full, with seven anonymised matters and what each one cost, in our white paper.
The agreements these negotiations produce
Agreement making applies across all four of our practice areas. The instrument differs; the method does not. The principals are admitted in New South Wales, in England and Wales, and in South Africa, and take matters outside Australia on the same terms.
- Land access and compensation — land access agreements and compensation agreements with private landholders, negotiated before the statutory clock becomes the only tool available.
- Native title and cultural heritage — Indigenous Land Use Agreements and the cultural heritage arrangements that run alongside them, conducted with cultural competence as core practice rather than as an add-on.
- Coexistence — co-existence agreements between proponents competing for the same ground, settling who builds what, where, and on what terms.
- Environmental and community — agreements with communities, regulators and interest groups reached before an objection hardens into a public campaign.
Equipoise negotiates and documents. We are not engaged as either party’s solicitors on the instrument itself, and each party should take its own legal advice before signing.
If your situation warrants a conversation.
Everything you share is confidential and goes directly to Nick, the principal. Equipoise takes six to eight matters per year across both services — billed hourly to scope the matter, then a single fixed fee once its complexity is clear.