legal services

That’s another fine mess we’ve gotten into!

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“That’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into!” – Oliver Hardy

A lot has been written in the past few weeks on Dentons* decision to no longer publish ‘meaningless‘ (their word, not mine) annual Profits Per Equity Partner (PEP) figures, the latest of which “Partners divided on reliability of PEP and need for transparency” was published on the legalweek.com website last Friday.

While I have a level of sympathy with Dentons argument – and the reality is that PEP figures really are meaningless to all but those who work in the firm, at the same time I do feel that the makings of this situation are those of the law firms themselves.

To expand, in the days prior to LLP status, law firms avoided the press – both legal and non-legal – like the plague. Then publications such as Martindale-Hubbell, Chambers and Asia Pacific Legal 500 started to gain traction and firms started to disclose the business/deals they had undertaken in the past 12 months in the hopes of getting good listings/rankings. In most cases this was done without firms asking their clients if they put any credit in these rankings and their feedback on the benefits of such a strategy.

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Demand for legal services in Australia is flat – so what can I do about it?

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Yesterday’s [4 July 2014] Australian newspaper Legal Affairs section published an article – “Top-tier firms axe hundreds of jobs” (subscription required if you wish to read the full article) – that opened with the following paragraph:

THE nation’s biggest law firms are in the midst of an employment shake-out with hundreds of jobs disappearing as the firms slash costs in the face of flat demand and intense competition.

The point of this post is not to opine on whether or not demand for legal services in Australia is truly flat, nor whether indeed demand among, so-called, ‘top-tier’ firms is intense, which I’ll leave for another day, but rather to comment on whether or not such flat demand, and indeed intense competition, should lead to the loss of hundred of jobs.

First off, anyone who has a memory even slightly longer than a gold fish, will recall that most (if not all) international firms (of whom most make up this so-called ‘top-tier’ level here in Australia) who entered the Australian market post the GFC cited “flat demand” in their domestic jurisdictions, and the need to grow revenue from other jurisdictions, as a strategic reason for doing such.

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