In an excellent article in today’s Australian profiling the likely exodus from law firms in the new year - owing to long hours for low, frozen pay while fat cat partners laugh all the way to the bank - the following is written:

Susan Ferrier, director of people and development at Allens Arthur Robinson — which has a pay freeze — said the firm wanted to avoid quickly changing policies on recruitment in case the latest signs of improvement were a “false economic dawn”.  “Post-Christmas I think many professional services organisations will have a clearer picture of where things are going in the economy,” she said.

The Firm Spy has profiled, and commented upon, a wide array of wanker corporate idioms, but “false economic dawn” is a new one and a particularly offensive way, we think, of saying:

the AAR partners dont want to spend a cent more than they are required  to.

Does this mean Allens Arthur Robinson lawyers have just awoken to the remuneration Dawn of the Dead? We think so. It is remarkable how quick the partnership was prepared to act when profits were thrown in to jeopardy when considering the extremely conservative approach it appears to be taking to responding to the economic up-tick.

Is it time for AAR to stop selling the drama?

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…And now that the housekeeping of the day is out of the way, onto some juicy gossip!

We received the following comments from an anonymous spy last week:

Hey guys, Thought you might like some news from the govt sector, which relates to over eager law and commerce grads. The ACCC are currently in their 6th month of deliberation to finalise a handful of grad positions in Melb/Syd/Canberra. Turns out the old HR [manager] flew the coup without making any selections, despite the applications sitting on his desk for over four months. He loved the good life of doing nothing at his desk so much, that he eventually quit to do the same thing from home! No one has been appointed in his position, and the Grads have been strung a long with the excuse that the ACCC is waiting to finalise the budget for next year to work out how many positions they have. To make things more interesting someone in HR has opened applications for 2011! Feel sorry for the kids, screwed by GFC, now hung out to dry by the ACCC

We feel sorry for the kids too, and not just because they will be stuck digging through the Trade Practices Act if and when they get an ACCC grad job.

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It probably won’t surprise many of our readers that we’ve been on the receiving end of a few nastygrams over the past few months. Some more amusing than others.  We thought it as good a time as any to clarify the intention of the site, which is to pass on gossip whose veracity is (by definition, duh) uncertain.  Unless we’re reporting confirmed news, we try to temper our comments or characterise them as “rumours”.

Of course, our readers are sometimes a scurrilous bunch, and there may be instances where rumours turn out to untrue.  If you think something has been posted about you (or your employer) which is untrue, in the first instance, please just contact Firm Spy directly. Our email address is news@firmspy.com. Don’t send us nasty letters; it’s a waste of time, and we’re reasonable people.  If you ask us to remove a post or comment in accordance with our Terms of Use, chances are, we’ll happily remove the offending item and, if necessary, issue a public apology.

Other than submitting comments, email is the only way to contact us directly.  The reason we encourage people to do this in the first instance is that it will avoid the incurring of unnecessary legal fees which will never be recovered. We don’t exist, remember.

So contact us directly! Don’t let your hard-earned dollars line the pockets of already grossly rich corporate law firm partners.

You’re not alone if you find yourself querying how the hell PWC managed to come second, trailing only Google, in a study released yesterday by an outfit named “Universum” profiling the most attractive employers to students.

Yes, PWC came second! The same firm that is rumoured to have:

• earlier this week ditched office Tim-Tams;
• forewarned staff ‘start looking for a new job’;
• has made at least two, and possibly three waves of redundancies in the last year;
• gave no quarter to very generous staff; and
• apparently threatened staff with the Tree Sword of Damocles.

So who conducted this study and who did they ask?

Well, Universum states on its website that:

Universum is the global leader in employer branding…We offer services and products that help employers attract, recruit and retain ideal talent while helping talent learn about ideal employers. To do so, we work hard to maintain our No.1 position in the employer branding industry and continue to earn the loyalty of our clients…

One of those clients isn’t PricewaterhouseCoopers, is it?

The PR escapades we have already witnessed from PWC certainly give us reason to doubt whether the survey is completely arms-length.

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It is a different kind of bickering emanating out of KPMG today. Usually we see employees lamenting their treatment at the hands of those superior to them, not those their equivalent. However, Firm Spy corporate bitching has been recast by the following sentiments received from an anonymous KPMG spy:

As a member of the KPMG Audit group - the group keeping the entire organisation above water - I find it difficult to digest the pay conditions levied against us… Im not alone in thinking that our pay reviews should be benchmarked against our performance in isolation, and not tied to how the firm travels more broadly… for example we should be paid more than tax and advisory…

Some of the more colourful comments have been edited. When harsh pay conditions and pay freezes are applied to an entire organisation, it is inevitable that some groups outperforming others will decry their remuneration and stigmatise the underperformers. But is it justified? Can anything less than fantastic employee remuneration be justified by the same Big4 accounting firm that:

• hoards ‘good’ banned employees;
• apparently saved $4,500,000.00 by reducing its graduate intake;
• is rumoured to force its staff to work ungodly hours; and
• implemented a laughable ‘Poo Poll’?

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It came as news to us that national top-tier firm Allens Arthur Robinson recently offered staff a 4-day working week.

or 4 days clean?

As reported in the current BRW:

Allens Arthur Robinson managing partner Michael Rose concedes that 115 staff members… left the firm as part of the voluntary redundancy program. But there is no plans for further cuts. “We had about 5% of staff take up a four-day week, and anyone who accrued annual leave of more than a year we encouraged them to take it,” he says. ‘We haven’t mandated anyone to go on a four-day week.”

With rumours circulating that AAR was recently poised to make further cuts to headcount, the Firm Spy applauds any initiative that Allens can use to save jobs. Of course, there is always the concern that a four-day-per-week worker must fit five days worth of work into four. Let the Firm Spy know first if the 4-day week is just a ruse to save the Allens partnership 20% in lawyer pay.

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Thanks to the BRW for the following interesting stats:

1. Mallesons - $552,000,000.00
2. Freehills - $493,000,000.00
3. Minter Ellison - $493,000,000.00
4. Clayton Utz - $490,700,000.00
5. Allens Arthur Robinson - $405,000,000.00*
6. Blake Dawson - $357,000,000.00
7. Corrs Chambers Westgarth - $235,000,000.00
8. DLA Phillips Fox - $223,500,000.00
   

   GFC? What GFC?
9. Deacons - $215,500,000.00
10. Baker & McKenzie - $155,100,000.00
11. Gadens Lawyers - $147,000,000.00
12. Gilbert + Tobin - $114,000,000.00
13. HWL Ebsworth - $106,900,000.00
14. Sparke Helmore Lawyers - $104,000,000.00
15. Slater & Gordon - $103,000,000.00
16. Middletons - $97,000,000.00*
17. Henry Davis York - $85,000,000.00
18. Maddocks - $82,000,000.00
19. McCullough Robertson - $73,000,000.00
20. Moray & Agnew - $63,500,000.00
21. Holding Redlich - $61,000,000.00
22. Herbert Geer - $53,700,000.00
23. Piper Alderman - $51,500,000.00
24. Lander & Rogers - $50,000,000.00
25. Thomas Playford Cutlers - $48,000,000.00
26. Arnold Bloch Leibler - $47,900,000.00
27. Hunt & Hunt - $46,000,000.00*
28. DibbsBarker - $42,800,000.00
29. Hall & Wilcox - $31,000,000.00
30. HopgoodGanim - $29,000,000.00*

*BRW estimate.

If you’re still doubting the imminent prospect of a Mallesons/Clifford Chance global merger, take one look at the Run of the Milliner.

Our favourite Chief Executive Partner, who a remarkable 58 of you think is a part-time warlock (see poll, to the right), featured in an article earlier today in The Australian about changes to lawyer remuneration in which the following was said:

Mr Milliner said the speed at which Australian firms abandoned “lock-step” salaries for all employed lawyers with the same years of service would be strongly influenced by international practice.

He said the use of lock-step salary setting had been declining at major British law firms before the global financial crisis and there was no reason why this trend should not continue once the global recovery became entrenched.

“Over time I think you will see movement (in Australia) away from lock-step towards greater degrees of performance-based salary-setting,” Mr Milliner said.

Hmmm… a remuneration change to please an international suitor, perhaps?

Since our article a couple of weeks ago in which we published a rumour suggesting a merger is set to take flight within weeks, the Firm Spy has been literally inundated with emails and tips from readers corroborating various parts of the anonymous quote we published. We have chosen not to publish these additional quotes because they add little value to what is already known. Of course we appreciate you sending them through.

The eurocentric, British slant informing Milliner’s comments above, however, must surely be the clearest sign yet that Mallesons Clifford Chance will set the legal world alight at some point in 2009.

Watch This Space.

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With a paradigm shift moving away from the billable unit in the offing, the following anonymous comments received from an anonymous Minter Ellison spy yesterday will no doubt add fuel to the fire:

… the vagaries of Minter Ellison billing narrations are probably a major part of what has provoked the corporate community to ask for wholesale changes to billing structures, such as fixed costs models. … what on earth is “strategy advice”? Is it a “strategic” bathroom break in which a partner ponders how best to fudge his time sheet? These opaque narrations should be queried by corporate clients who should also demand a shift away from a model that allows partners to record seven-figure salaries with such ease…

Do you have a favourite narration to get you out of a “low-billing” day?

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