Forgotten Canadian rocker Alanis Morissette was once big news; she shot to international stardom in 1995 with the release of her hit album Jagged Little Pill. Staggeringly, this album remains the best-selling debut album by a female artist in the US and the highest selling debut album worldwide, with 30 million albums being sold globally.

its a deal!

The first single off the album, featuring Flea and Dave Navarro from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers,  was the smash hit You Oughtta Know; a song about an adulterous ex-lover of Morissette’s. The identity of the ex-boyfriend is a matter of controversy, with Wikipedia flagging both of Friends star Matt LeBlanc and Full House dad Bob Saget as potential candidates. Although the identity may be unclear, the song includes some very clear instances of curious sexual behaviour, including a reference to Ms Morrisette performing fellatio on her ex-boyfriend in a movie theatre.

We believe that Canadian Judge Lori Douglas must have been listening to Alanis when she volunteered to be pornographically photographed by her lawyer husband performing oral sex on him, dressed in bondage, chains and with sex toys.

The photos have since been leaked to a porn website.

According to CBC News:

If pictures of you naked end up on an internet site, it’s quite difficult to say you have the credibility to be a judge… I think the facts are sufficiently suspect to warrant disclosure and to raise very important questions as to whether such a person should have been appointed a judge

It turns out that the complainant (if his story is to be believed) was groomed by the Judge’s husband to sleep with Justice Douglas as part of an elaborate interacial sex fantasy. It allegedly involved the couple placing nude photos of Justice Douglas on the website Darkcavern with an advert flagging that a “smooth black man” was wanted:

The complainant first met Justice Douglas’ husband when he retained him to handle his divorce. Several months later, according to CBC News:

Chapman said [Justice Douglas’ husband] invited him out for a drink and mentioned a porn website devoted to interracial sex, particularly black men and white women.

Mr Chapman alleges he was provided with an internet address and a password and instructed to look at a section entitled “Our White Princesses” where white females attract black men by posting photos of themselves. According to CBC News:

Do you know better than to post nude pictures of your spouse on the internet? You oughtta know!

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To the anonymous barrister who messaged Firm Spy - without leaving an email address - please get in touch with an email address as we’d like to hear from you.

Also, to the ex-Shine Lawyers employee - yes, you can definitely be of assistance - but we need your contact details too. Please email us again and leave them!

Our friends at ALB delivered a huge scoop yesterday, reporting that the Adelaide office  of DLAPF would merge with specialist Adelaide tax firm Rankine Tucker.  The firm will be called Fox Tucker and will open its doors on September 6.*** For the dyslexics in the room, that’s “Tox F*cker”. This development follows from an exclusive report we published earlier in the year that the Adelaide office of DLA Phillips Fox had become financially independent of the rest of DLA Phillips Fox.

DLA Piper profit map

Both developments, we believe, form part of a carefully calibrated plan to lure DLAPF’s international affiliate DLA Piper into a full merger with DLA Phillips Fox. This would entitle Australian-based partners to a share of DLA Piper’s global equity pool and is something profitable Aussie partners are understandable eager to facilitate. This includes, of course, DLAPF’s Chief Executive Partner Tony Holland, who left Mallesons in 2008 in preference for a stint DLA Piper’s Dubai office, presumably in search of huge tax-free dollars. However, Mr Holland arrived only to watch the Dubai office fall to pieces when a few months later its major client Nakheel Corp fell on hard times. This ill-timed move has likely come at significant personal cost to Mr Holland; he now finds himself in a considerably less lucrative partnership, not to mention that income tax is payable in Australia. Profits in 2008/2009 were estimated at the following levels between the two firms:

• Mallesons - $1.6m (approx); and
• DLA Phillips Fox - 1.2m (approx).

If those figures are correct (we don’t know if they are), it should come as no surprise that he is championing the idea of a full DLA Piper integration (if the A&O triple jump is anything to go by). Earlier in the year, we published the rumour that Mr Holland was chasing this end with considerable zeal:

Tony Holland wants to get rid of a heap of partners who are not in corporate or finance - ie turn Phillips Fox into another MSJ. Then, and only then, will Sir Nigel at DLA [Piper] give the nod to the full merger.

So what does Firm Spy know about the merger?

Following from the scoop yeasterday, we received the following comments from an anonymous DLAPH spy:

Dearest FS,

For showing your warmth of heart yesterday by removing your post regarding our lovely firm spokeswoman, I thought I would send you some news at the emotions around the firm on the news that we are completely severing DLAPF Adelaide from the broader firm. Everyone I have privately spoken with about this development regards it as the most significant step in the integration by DLA Piper into Australia. We’re all expecting something official to be announced before year’s end.

From what I have heard from DLAPF partners, DLA Piper regards our transactional groups as being attractive enough to formalise an alliance, but a major stumbling block was the Adelaide office which is/was constituted primarily by smaller groups like insurance and DR…

We also received these no-nonsense comments from another anonymous DLAPF spy:

DLA Piper to announce formal merger in a few weeks, with actual merged entity to commence 1 January 2011.

Here is a brief overview of how the firm has changed in the last few months:

• In August DLA Phillips Fox severed ties with its Adelaide office, cutting loose several litigation, employment and insurance partners;
• In May, DLA Phillips Fox appointed Greg Clifton as special counsel in its corporate team and Michelle Gaze as a senior associate in its project finance team;
• In May a a global DLA Piper partner’s conference in May was held which “could lead to a more definitive time frame” as to the timing of the merger;
• In March, the entire “media and entertainment” team defected from DLA Phillips Fox for Tresscox;
• In February, DLA Phillips Fox construction partner Alex Harmann left the firm to join Baker & McKenzie;
• In November last year John Hutchison and Tony Macafee joined DLA Phillips Fox as corporate partners
  
• In October last year, environment and planning senior associate Kim Piskuric left DLA Phillips Fox for Maddocks;
• In August last year, veteran DLA Phillips Fox construction partner Chris Edquist left the firm to join Holding Redlich; and
  
• In late May 2009 environmental law specialist Daniel Clay left DLA Phillips Fox for Minter Ellison,

From what has been reported, therefore, we have seen the loss of the “media” team, the shrinking of the construction team, the withering of the environment, litigation, employment and insurance groups, and a corresponding strengthening of the corporate and banking groups.

Does this sound like music to Sir Nigel’s ears?

Send the Firm Spy your news and views!

*** As soon as we read the name ‘Fox Tucker’, we immediately pondered “what is a fox’s tucker?”. We typed “what do foxes eat” and discovered that:

Foxes eat small rodents, such as mice and rats.

We hope Fox Tucker makes a few bigger kills as it fights for market share.

We are reliably informed that in sporting parlance, the first day of this working week is known in AFL circles as “Mad Monday”. It is a day fabled for the Bacchanalian indulgences of players from the less successful clubs of the AFL . Dress-ups, booze and general frivolity are but the norm. On this day two years ago, for example, a celebratory Brendon Fevola “paraded outside a city bar in a nightie with a sex toy protruding from his pants” (for footage of the event, click here).

is anything available?

But while Fev occupied himself with a giant dildo and Ben Cousins probably spent this day Travis Tucking into his first bag of “bye-bye-urine-tests”,  we think it was a very different kind of Monday madness which gripped top-tier law firm Mallesons earlier this week. Not only did the firm have to digest the reference made in Friday’s News article (read by half of corporate Australia) that the firm is “run like a prison farm”, but it was also forced to endure the galling task of reading the BRW Top 500 Private Companies.

It was far from cause to celebrate.

The BRW revealed that in the last financial year, Mallesons revenue dropped by 10.5%; a drop-kick trajectory that would see the firm fold like Fitzroy within a handful of years. Not even Clayton Utz, a firm we recently characterised as being on the precipice of nuclear meltdown, could come within a 50m-arc of Mallesons. Clutz posted a revenue decline of 9.7%.

However, both Clutz and Mallesons stood in stark contrast to other top-tier firms:

• Blake Dawson revenue declined by 3.5%;
• Freehills revenue declined by 3%;
• Allens Arthur Robinson revenue (based on BRW estimates) appears to have grown by approx 2%; and
• Minter Ellison revenue grew by 2%

So powerful was this shirt-front that Mallesons has tumbled from its position as Australia’s largest firm by revenue, losing that premiership flag to Minter Ellison by $8.6m. And while Clutz’s fall is explicable by a number of umpire reports (in particular the loss of key partners to A&O), we cant think of any such excuse that is available for Mallesons.

If there are no excuses, what next?

When football fans perceive that their club is underperforming, invaribaly it results in the sacking of the coach. But what happens when a law firm isn’t performing?

Fortunately, Chief Executive Partner Robert MIlliner has already considered the prospect of life after Mallesons, making the following comments to BRW in July of this year:

Post-Mallesons Plan: “I won’t go back into practice - I’ll go and do something different… I wouldn’t mind another executive role - it’s a question of what’s available. I was thinking about doing a few boards and a few people have said to me, oh, you’re too young - young in the sense that I should do a full-time executive role first.”

In relation to the “question of what’s available”, do you think opportunities will open up for the coach that has taken his team from premiership glory to … wooden-spooner-in-waiting?

Send the Firm Spy your news and views!

Yesterday’s porkbelly reminded us of something we wrote a few months ago …

The image of a pig’s rectum probably isn’t what most corporate Australian firms would consider an appropriate emblem to attract business to the firm through internet marketing campaigns. People already associate pigs with dirt and grime, so if you went looking for a lawyer and instead hit a website with a pig’s anus staring at you (yes, the actual ring!), you might think there is a better qualified individual on the market to assist you with your legal issues.

daunting pork

But this hasn’t stopped the marketing gurus at O’Reilly Stevens Bovey Lawyers - a boutique outfit operating out of a sty Cairns - from proudly placing a picture of a pig’s backside, tail up, on its firm’s website homepage.

Prefatory words appear at the top of the picture, rhetorically asking:

So you don’t think you need legal advice…

Then viewers are directed to the piglet’s bottom.

A labradore, with a newspaper in its mouth, also appears on another of the firm’s webpages, as does a brace of ducks. You might find yourself asking:

What on earth does a dog, a duck and a pig’s arse have to do with legal advice?

WE DONT KNOW.

We thought it was strange that the farm firm would use the buzz words “Real people, real solutions”, yet use images of animals across its website.

Is someone telling pork pies? We invite you to ham-it-up in the comments to this post with your views.

Here are the thoughts of the anonymous spy who snorted tipped us off to the site (excellent work - your comments and the site had us rolling in the mud with laughter!):

Ok so this isn’t really news but some things just need to gain wider attention. I was looking through the criminal law specialists in Queensland today and I came across a guy called Stephen O’Reilly. For all I know Stephen is a normal guy and a great lawyer but surely questions need to be asked when an individual is a principal of a firm who puts together a website such as this…. http://www.osblawyers.com. Initially I thought I’d entered a typo and stumbled across some sort of farm porn (not for the first time admittedly) but, no, it’s true. The boys at OBS (and I’m not talking about the Order of St Benedict) decided that this was a suitable image for their homepage.

We thought the pig’s arse comedy (if that’s what it is) went particularly well with the firm’s “Estate Planning” webpage, on which the following is written:

It’s easy to put off thinking about the unpleasant topics of dying or becoming incapable of managing your own affairs…the staff at O’Reilly Stevens Bovey have the understanding to assist in the administration of deceased estates…we endeavour to make this often daunting task as easy as possible during your difficult time.

Yes a BLT would make this all, well, just a little less “daunting”! Perhaps we could have the labradore transport the Will to the office for safekeeping?

Send the Firm Spy your news and views!

You will soon notice small changes emerging on Firm Spy. We are gradually going to update the site to give it a new look and feel. You will notice the new share buttons on the bottom of each post (please share with your friends!) - these are the first of some larger changes that you will soon see.

the power is now in your hands

A couple of weeks ago we asked our readers to sign up to our weekly newsletter. This is something that will also be changing soon; there will be articles that feature in our newsletter that do not appear on www.firmspy.com. So if you want to stay abreast of all of our latest news and gossip, be sure to sign up! To do so, please type your email address in the column to the right underneath the apt heading “weekly newsletter”. Be sure to click the “subscribe” button too.

Despite changes to Firm Spy, the content of our posts will of course remain the same.

This brings us to the iPhone App.

It is not an app in the traditional sense, but it is the best thing we could muster given the very tight and finite resources at our disposal.

Instructions:

1. open Safari on your iPhone;
2. go to www.firmspy.com;
3. press the “+” sybmol at the bottom of the safari browser;
4. select “add to home screen”;
5. confirm by selecting “add” in the top right corner of the page.

The Firm Spy “app” should then pop up.

In due course, the app will be optimised for anonymous tip submissions, meaning all our readers can contribute at any time of day without fear of being monitored from work computers.

So get in touch!

Send the Firm Spy your news and views!

We spent a reasonable chunk of the last 48 hours researching the difference between journalism and communications/public relations.  No, we’re not “communications professionals”, so a bit of research was necessary.

For thoe unitiated, communications/PR staff are employed by many professional services firms primarily to shape public perceptions of their firm in positive ways. Part of this role involves regular interaction with journalists: Comms/PR staff are experts in dealing with journalists. They often provide journalists with an “official” comment from the firm on a particular news item which invariably results in the firm being positively perceived in any subsequent news article.

Websites like Lawyers Weekly, ALB and The New Lawyer are industry paragons in this regard. These sites regularly show how competent communications professionals can shape journalist reportage in ways that are positive for the firm in question (by the way, a big congrats to Lawyers Weekly on its 500th edition - click here to check it out!).

Such is the tremendous importance of PR that Bill Gates once said:

If I only had two dollars left I would spent one dollar on PR.

And Bill knows a thing or two about how to spend cash!

Although it is one thing for a communications professional to competently fulfil their job description by dealing with journalists, it is entirely a different thing for comms staff to comment on the relevance of our site from the perspective of the firm’s employees and to dictate to those employees what is “worthy of their attention”. Neither PR staff nor partners in firms have any business dictating to their staff what they should read and what they should not. They do not possess the professional competence even to provide guidance in this regard because it is purely a matter of opinion.

As unprofessional communicators, we understand that the communications professional previously forming the subject matter of this post was probably either acting according to the instructions of her superiors, or simply indulging in a frolic outside the scope of her professional competence.

We think 2 tough days was enough.

No doubt this information will soon be worthy enough to come to her attention!

Send the Firm Spy your news and views!

A Von Dousass administrative assistant, or a clerk or something, doing a good job, at something.

Today’s embarrassing firm website award goes to… Von Dousass, an Adelaide-based commercial firm.  One of our eagle-eyed Tipsters noticed this gem among the coveted, but seldom read, ‘our people’ pages:

“Tamara is an admininstrative [sic] assistant, or a clerk or something and she does a good job.”

Looking past the misspelling of ‘administrative’, as our tipster commented, “This firm really cares for their support staff. “  Too right.  Then again, at least this firm’s support staff actually get a profile at all!  But perhaps the firm should have asked Tamara to proofread the website profiles - we’re sure she would have done a better job.

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We can’t be sure because we’re a comparatively new entrant in this space, but we expect that scarcely in Australia’s history has a law firm have so unequivocally declared its policital partisanship as has Freehills in recent times.

Freehills keeps watch

The AFR reported yesterday:

The Liberal party has underscored the importance of the cliffhanger election result by engaging high-profile senior Freehills partner Steven Penglis to oversee the count… He said his role… was simply to “keep watch over proceedingsa’ for the Liberal Party.

A Freehills partner retained to ensure the vote-counters don’t smuggle any Liberal votes in their, err … budgies!

But the allegiances between Freehills and the Liberal Party appear to run much deeper than “watch-dog” Steven Penglis’ estimated $5000 per-day role:

• The winner of the inner-Melbourne seat of Higgins (recently vacated by Peter Costello) is a former Freehills solicitor by the name of Kelly O’Dwyer;
• Senator Michaelia Cash, elected to Parliament in 2007, is also a Freehills alumni;
• Gregory Stephen Pearce is a current member of the NSW legislative council and he too cut his teeth in the working world at Freehills; and
• Matthew Mason-Cox, elected to the NSW Legislative Council in 2006, is yet another Liberal Party member who started his career at Freehills.

We stopped looking after the fifth page of Google under the search terms “Freehills and the Liberal Party”, but no doubt there are several other current members of Parliament who once worked at Freehills, not to mention many more who are retired or were not re-elected that also worked at the firm and who also bear allegiance to the Liberal Party.

So we’ve got a whole bunch of ex-Freehills Liberals sitting in office and a current Freehills partner zealously advancing the interests of his current client, being the Liberal Party whose interest is to claim an election victory and govern Australia.  But with lucrative Federal government jobs like “advisor to the Federal Government on the NBN project” recently up for grabs, isn’t it a huge risk to apparently declare political allegiances when the matter of who will next govern the country is still very much open to question?

Which brings us back to Mr Penglis; the man overseeing the election for the benefit of the Liberals. A cursory Google search revealed that this isn’t the first “election” he has involved himself in. Late last year, Mr Penglis represented two female-to-male transsexuals who wanted to gain legal recognition as males despite electing not to undergo gender reassignment surgery:

The pair will take their appeal to court in February after the Gender Reassignment Board of WA refused to acknowledge their sex change because they still had female reproductive organs and could potentially bear children.

It seems straightforward enough to the team here at FS: if you’re physiologically a female (evidenced by your sexual organs), then notwithstanding your subjective beliefs and motivations, you will be declared by the Gender Reassignment Board as a female. But Mr Penglis and his clients begged to differ. With absolutely no pun intended, Mr Penglis told The Australian at the time:

They’re desperate to have what they consider their true gender recognised … it’s a real issue and the bottom line is, the board has effectively said no female can be reassigned a male without the requirement to go through a hysterectomy.

Although we’re unsure of the result of this case, presumably Liberal Party boffins considered Penglis something of an election expert following his distillation of the “bottom line” in this case. But tt is less clear whether if faced with a Liberal loss in this hotly contested WA seat, Mr Penglis will simply argue that Mr Abbott should be declared the winner because “he believes he is a winner”.

Do you have a “hung” or “bottom line” election?

Send the Firm Spy your news and views!

In early September 2009 our friends at ALB reported that Jones Day was intending to build its Sydney office into a “full service offering”. To achieve this, the firm recruited the head of Freehills restructuring and insolvency - Philip Hoser. At the time, Hoser told ALB that Jones Day would be ramping up its presence in Australia and so too might other US firms:

Jones Day hands partners some winter gloves

“I don’t think it will happen to the same extent as [when US firms made a move in the late 80’s and 90’s to] London because the market isn’t nearly as deep but it’s absolutely clear to me that Australia, both by itself and as a regional hub, is an important place for these US firms to be … Jones Day has identified that opportunity and made a commitment to building on it.”

Ominously, Mr Hoser also added at the time:

“It takes time to bring people across from other firms so it’s not something that will happen overnight but watch this space and I think you will see [the firm] grow considerably…”

Indeed, the firm has apparently just snared its first major partnership acquisition since Mr Hoser’s September 2009 comments. In a major scoop, the Firm Spy can today reveal the rumour that a highly regarded Allens Arthur Robinson Energy & Resources partner allegedly defected to Jones Day in the last few days.

We received the following comments from an anonymous AAR spy yesterday:

Jones Day has apparently nabbed a senior mining partner from AAR, Tony Wassaf. Don’t know if it rivals Mallesons recent pain, but it does have upper management concerned at what this may mean for the firm as other foreign interlopers upset the cosy Australian apple cart. Jones Day are also apparently paying associates a tidy sum more than at Allens, something the cosy cartel of big firm salary fixers must hate.

Cozy cartel, indeed.  Wassaf is still listed as a partner on the Allens website, so we can’t confirm the move at this stage. Still, as a 20-year partner of the firm, he’s quite likely to be one of the most important members of one of AAR’s more important practice groups. So yes,  upper management would be very worried! Shall we call this one …  an upper management upper-cut?

In the A&O raid on Clayton Utz earlier in the year, several defecting partners also operated in the coveted energy & resources space. So if Wassaf’s departure is confirmed (which will likely feature in rival media before too long), it is quickly becoming clear that international entrants in the Australian legal market have an appetite for energy & resources practitioners.  And that means that the dynamic, pin-striped “mining lawyers” in your office all of a sudden got a whole lot more punching power.

But will they use that punching power to raise the issue of the Jones Day global equity fund which they might get access to upon defecting, thereby potentially receiving an A&O-style triple jump? It would knock the Jones Daylights out of your firm if a group of E&R partners demanded a dramatic increase in their equity share, so perhaps it is time to put on the boxing gloves?

Send the Firm Spy your news and views!