Following the major coup announced on Monday that over a dozen Clayton Utz partners would be defecting to international rival A&O to establish Australian offices of the firm, Allen & Overy yesterday added a new page on the careers section of its website featuring the following advertisement:
We are looking forward to building our practice in Australia. We expect to have vacancies for experienced lawyers shortly, so please submit your covering letter and CV if you are interested in working for Allen & Overy in Australia. You can do this via the job search function to the right of this page. We will keep your details and will contact you if any suitable opportunities arise.
Soon after this, Paul Quinn from Quintessential Marketing told Smart Company that after a tough year, the sector is booming again:
Anecdotally I know that for recruiters, some of them have had their best month ever in January and had a good result after an ordinary year last year. Recruitment activity is on the rise, which would also flow through into headhunting and poaching.
Meanwhile, Chandler Macleao, executive general manager David Reynolds, told Smart Company last month he had:
already heard of workers leaving for greener pastures… employees may have stayed in their current roles during the global financial crisis because of high unemployment, and have put up with actions they might not have otherwise such as pay freezes.
These comments are to be contrasted with the hallucinations remarks made by Susan Ferrier of AAR a couple of weeks ago that there are, in effect, no jobs out there.
But is there a new talent war? If so, what will this mean for your firm and your pay freeze? By our count, no less than four of the six top tier firms are still enforcing a pay freeze or something closely resembling it…
In relation to Clayton Utz’s loss of key personnel, Dwyer Heath’s director Ted Dwyer told the AFR:
[it must be a] shock to the system… one of the things the major firms pride themselves on is the quality of their people. Any dilution of that base represents a dilution of the strength of the firm, and not only that, but they will take a lot of people with them.
As we reported yesterday, indeed new A&O partners may take other Clutz fee-earners with them - 25 lawyers are rumoured to be leaving. But will they take clients? One astute, anonymous firm spy sent us the following comments yesterday:
I consider the dilution of A&O’s equity to be a major risk that could well come to nothing. Think about it – clients ‘belonging’ to the 14/15 partners leaving the firm may consider that it is currently ‘top heavy’ and that the depth of expertise is lacking. However they may also consider that Clayton Utz no longer has the partnership expertise that their business requires. All of this could mean that other top-tier firms will claim new clients and both Allen & Overy and Clayton Utz will suffer.
So what does all of this mean for Clayton Utz? Is it past its Utz-By Date? One anonymous Clayton Utz spy told us that remaining partners are already seeing the silver ining:
…I cant believe I overheard a Clutz partner joking about how we will make a great saving on tenancy costs. Already!
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