Advisory and litigation in public business law, in Nouméa. Construction, energy, environment — matters where the engineering is complex and the exposure is substantial.
Award and performance of public contracts: works and services, concessions, public service delegations, partnerships. For businesses, local authorities and mixed-economy companies alike.
Planning law and development zones, land structuring, site supervision. We follow the project from the first consent to the final account, and the defects that surface long after.
Advice and defence for public employers and their staff alike: disciplinary proceedings, harassment, injuries at work. A practice proven in the hospital sector.
Breaches of probity: favouritism, unlawful taking of interest, corruption. We act on the criminal liability of public decision-makers and elected officials, upstream and before the court.
Local institutions and their satellites: division of powers, resolutions and regulatory acts, joint authorities and intercommunal cooperation, incorporation and governance of mixed-economy and local public companies.
Bringing or resisting claims against the administration: damage from public works, defective maintenance of public infrastructure, wrongful failure to act, unlawful seizure. Policing powers, organisation and continuity of public services.
Choosing and securing the operating model: direct management, delegation, concession, local public company. Water and wastewater, waste collection and treatment, electricity distribution. Tariffs and charges, continuity and equal treatment of users, end of contract and return of assets.
Public law has become the law of projects.
Behind every administrative decision, every public contract, every development scheme lie human, economic and institutional stakes.
Ambre Theuil
Four years practising public law in Montpellier, at Charrel & Associés, before returning to found her own firm in Nouméa — her hometown.
“In New Caledonia and across the Pacific, public law works alongside realities found nowhere else, at the meeting point of institutional, economic and human stakes. I see my practice as a law of action: preventing, securing and defending those who build this territory.”
The firm acts for public and private parties alike: securing their decisions, heading off legal risk, and defending their interests when litigation becomes unavoidable.
ATA Avocats, NouméaWe read the record. All of it. The contract and its amendments, council deliberations, opposing briefs, expert reports. A position holds because of the facts behind it, not the principle in front of it.
The lawyer who takes the matter is the one who argues it. No handover, no dilution. You know who you are speaking to, from the first call to the hearing.
Administrative litigation is measured in years. We hold the line for the duration — protecting what has to keep working: a contract still being performed, a relationship with the administration, a public service that cannot stop.
New Caledonia writes part of its own law: local statutes, shared powers, institutions that exist nowhere else. We plead within that exact framework, not a mainland approximation of it.
A first conversation, at no cost, to understand what is at stake and tell you plainly whether we are the right firm for it.
