Prime-ministerial candidate Tony Abbott – a man who once warned women against pre-marital sex despite fornicating with his college girlfriend and consequently having to endure an embarrassing public paternity test – was mocked by media around the country yesterday for the appaulingly inarticulate views he has expressed in relation to the Coalition’s national broadband policy.
While we don’t want to turn today’s post into a political rant, we thought Tony Abbott’s unrefined broadband policy views would make excellent fodder for a contrast with the views expressed by AAR Chief Michael Rose in his recent interview with BRW. So, for today’s post…
THAT’S OUR ACTION CONTRACT.
Through its interview with Mr Rose, the BRW was able to compile an article appearing in this week’s edition of the magazine, entitled Vision Splendid. But was this really an “interview” in the traditional sense, or a painc phone call from Mr Rose?
The article begins with some unedifying drivel about how Mr Rose “doesn’t want to talk about his predecessor” (the inference being in our minds that there was some kind of rift between Rose and AAR‘s former CEP Tom Poulton), before leading onto a short statistical grab from last year’s BRW Top 500. The article then finally gets to its point: BRW availing the use of its medium to allow AAR to respond to our post entitled AAR Loses Head (Count) After Short Jab, Uppercut & Knockout Blow.
In that post, we extracted parts of an article published by AFR in which it is alleged AAR
staff were told the firm was locked into its lease and the only factor that could be adjusted was people. Many Allens lawyers were called into a meeting with their partner only to be presented with a resignation letter and told to go now with a payout, or be pushed later with no payout… [one ex-AAR lawyer told the AFR that] in order to receive the payout he] had to sign a deed of release promising he would not leak any information about the firm, “and if we did, they would hunt us out and sue us”, he says. The difference of 70 lawyers between the 108 lost by the firm last calendar year and the 38 or so that are accounted for under the voluntary redundancy program, was done by “stealth”, the lawyer says.
We also pointed in our post to rumours we published last year about involuntary AAR redundacies to buttress the remarks from the AFR.
But AAR appears unhappy to take the Firm Spy short-jabs lying down. Yes, it looks decidedly like Michael “Ring-a-Ring-a” Rose has picked up the BRW panic phone, with this week’s BRW article Vision Splendid offering the following passage:
any dramatic loss in [this year's] revenue was staved off by cost-cutting measures, largely a result of the firm’s voluntary redundancy program executed between June and July last year***… Rose says forced redundancies were not necessary but mandatory four-day weeks were implemented in the Chinese and Vietnamese offices. He rejects the suggestion the firm engaged in a “freezing out” policy – whereby supervising partners would stop distributing work to lawyers, making them unable to meet billable targets.
“I haven’t heard that term used,” he says… “Partners are encouraged to keep lawyers busy. We have an incentive scheme in the firm and the same number of people qualified this year as last year so there hasn’t been a shortening up of work.”
Conspicuously absent from Mr Rose’s rebuttal, however, is any reference to the claim published by the AFR that some lawyers were given an ultimatum to accept a confidential payout to leave the firm, or risk staying on and being “frozen out” and receiving no such payment. Sure, those that opted to “take their chances” and decline the “offer” might not ultimately have been frozen out (we don’t know this to be true, however), but it is a different thing to say that the confidential offers were never made. Perhaps Mr Rose intentionally omitted to address this issue with his BRW panic call, or maybe he just isn’t across the detail like “Phoney” Tony Abbott’s conceptualisation of his broadband policy.
But even more dubious than his reticence with respect to the alleged “ultimatum”, was Rose’s endeavour to attenuate the objective possibility that “freeze outs” occurred by reference to his claim that there had not been a “shortening up of work”. He even attempts to substantiate the claim that work-flows are good by reference to the number of lawyers qualifying for the firm’s incentive scheme. He doesn’t divulge the specifics of the number of lawyers qualifying for a bonus or what they actually received, so let’s turn to the thoughts of an anonymous AAR spy from the Firm Spy Remuneration Survey:
REALLY frustrated about pay review – I regularly bill at 135% of my billable target, work crazy hours and weekends for an extra $5000?!? I had been holding out for ‘better’ times with a firm I previously felt loyal to – but with all the cutbacks, additional enforced christmas leave time, lack of any form of morale boost and now the poor pay increase, I’m very flat and disenchanted.
The message we are getting from management – not a single reassuring word – they still have more lawyers than they need and want ppl to leave
Maybe AAR had an equal number of lawyers qualifying for its bonus scheme but decided to low-ball them. A bit like “Phoney” Tony Abbott’s broadband plan vis-a-vis that promoted by the Labor party.
And as for the claims that AAR hasn’t suffered a “shortening up of work” (which Rose craftily used in the BRW article to create doubt in the minds of readers that freeze outs could have occurred), what about the comments Mr Rose made to the AFR in late June? Rose said:
“We’ve started to see workflows increase in most practice areas. Perhaps the one that is still sluggish is mergers and acquisitions… We are expecting … litigation to strengthen. Resources is looking good although the uncertainty around the resources tax might have some impact on that.”
If Rose’s AFR comments are anything to go by, it certainly sounds to us like AAR experienced a “shortening up of work” that it is hoping to recover from. But concussions tend to linger, don’t they?
Is Mr Rose across all the detail? Or was his phone call to BRW really a “phoney” call?
Send the Firm Spy your news and views!
***Since when did the maintenance of revenue become a function of reduced head-count? Shouldn’t profitability go up, but revenue go down, when there is a major reduction in headcount? Or does the alleged consistency in revenue simply point to the needlessness of the firm’s redundancy program?
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