Snake & Bake! Baker & McKenzie Hisses at Long-Nosed Adder SAs

In late August last year, with a post entitled “Shit Sandwich”, we reported the news that Baker & McKenzie had elevated Bruce Hambrett to the chairmanship of its Australian offices.

snake and bake!

We reckoned that Bruce picked up something of a poisoned chalice and we’re afraid that Mr Hambrett has, in the interim, done very little to source the anti-venom that his staff desperately need.

The AFR Partnership Survey contained the following comments from Hambrett’s right-hand-rattler man, national managing partner Mark Chappel:

Baker & McKenzie managing partner Mark Chapple says becoming a partner at a top tier firm has become difficult. “If you’re a really bright, effective senior associate and you see the partner tap has been turned off, there’s now a big moat and it’s almost impossible to jump over,” he says. Lawyers, who are typically ambitious people, “see that and then they look around for where the opportunities are,” he says.

These comments probably come as a bit of a snake-bite to Baker & McKenzie SAs currently slithering (at least in their own minds) toward the partnership. However, the comments are buttressed by the AFR partnership statistics which show that the firm has added a net total of only 1 extra partner in the last year, moving from 89 to 90, an increase of 1.1% (3 partners left the firm, 4 were added). Said the AFR of Bakers paltry growth:

Mark Chappel says the firm has kept a lid on staff growth to ensure it remains in proportion with the broader [Baker & McKenzie] network.  “We’re not ourselves looking to become the size of Mallesons or Clayton Utz. We think we’re much closer to what the right size is for the Australian market than perhaps they are,” he says.

But where have the new Baker & McKenzie partners come from? Three of the four total partners appointed between July 2009 and July 2010, it turns out, were apparently lateral recruits from Mallesons Stephen Jaques.

So if you’re a hard-working Bakers SA, who has matured from an Articled Bakers snakelet into long-nosed corporate adder, the news that the firm has placed a python’s strangelhold over the partnership numbers – and will apparently afford primary consideration to lateral partnership candidates – must be perceived as a viperish act of “snaking and baking”.

But the death-bite, which we think might see a few SAs snaking their way out of the firm, are the following statistics also contained in the AFR Partnership Survey:

Although Bakers is the 10th-biggest firm by revenue, it has the 12th-biggest partnership and the 14th=biggest number of full-time equivalent, non-partner fee-earners.

That’s right – a firm with the very high revenue has a comparatively low number of partners and an even lower number of full time staff. So despite being in argubaly an ideal position to make new partners, the firm has declared that there is now “a moat that is almost impossible to jump over”, and, in the event that it does make up partners, it will almost exclusively look lterally.

In explaining the statistics (and we picture a tongue flicking in and out of his mouth as his says this), Mr Chappel hissed:

“For us, it isn’t about being national or being the biggest in Australia,” Chappel says. “We look at things through a global firm”.

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