Having spent eight years working as a project finance lawyer, working for banks and companies on the drafting and negotiation of natural resource and infrastructure development projects in emerging markets, I began to have doubts as to why I chose a legal career. Through a mixture of further study, grasping consulting opportunities and networking, I have put myself on an ongoing trajectory towards finding more depth and meaning to my work. In this seminar I will talk about my background, my book to be published with Cambridge University Press on the implementation of indigenous peoples rights to land in public/private financed transnational development projects and the projects I have been involved with after leaving a law firm environment. I hope this will foster some creative and positive thinking around the type of work you can do with a contractual and commercial law background and will help students from feeling pigeon holed, as I did, early on in my private law career.

Dr. Kinnari Bhatt (LLB Law with French Birmingham University, LPC Nottingham law school, MsC Political Economy of Development and PhD) is an English qualified solicitor. She worked at White and Case LLP and Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy LLP for eight years as a project finance solicitor, as a legal consultant to the World Bank and Department for International Development drafting the environmental regulations for the mining sector in Sierra Leone and as a civil society adviser to the Natural Resource Governance Institute on mining code reform in Guinea. She is co-vice chair of the UK Chagos Support Association and has written and campaigned to bring attention to the ongoing human rights situation of the Chagossian community in the UK. She has taught modules on the legal aspects of international finance, project financing and sustainable development at LSE, UCL and UEA. She currently coordinates the business and human rights aspects of a rule of law and human rights project at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands.