Aborted; 3 New Mothers Made Redundant @ McMahon Clarke

Virtually without exception, major Australian law firms (as well as the Big 4) recently made the welcome announcement that maternity leave entitlements would be increased. Emblematic of this are Mallesons and Corrs:

an infantile response

• Mallesons Stephen Jaques announced in July that it has increased its paid parental leave from 12 weeks, accumulated according to years of service, to 14 weeks after one year of employment. The firm has also increased its leave for secondary carers, from one week to three weeks’ paid leave;
• Corrs Chambers Westgarth, meanwhile, introduced a 14 weeks’ paid parental leave in November 2005 and offers secondary care takers three weeks’ leave.

But one firm is apparently bucking this trend toward fortifying parental leave entitlements. That firm is Brisbane mid-tier McMahon Clarke, a firm that until recently boasted:

six partners, 23 lawyers and a team of 40 employees.

We received the following comments from an anonymous McMahon Clarke spy earlier in the week:

The GFC is alive and well in Queensland and law firm redundancies continue. Smaller mid-tier firm McMahon Clarke (the modern day derivation of the once might Teys McMahon) made 15 people redundant yesterday – that a fair cut for a firm of only about 40 or 50 people. The best part of it is that beyond the usual “unecessary admin staff” the firm cut it’s wills and estates division. Who would have thought that people stopped dying because of the GFC?

We called the managing partner of McMahon Clarke, Sean McMahon, to confirm this rumour. He advised us that only a handful of employees were made redundant and that it was based purely on a commercial decision to cease operating in the field of wills & estates (despite advising us that the practice was profitable). Interestingly, Mr McMahon advised that three of the people made redundant were new mothers who had been in a job-sharing arrangement since the recent birth of their babies. Mr McMahon said that despite its endeavours to keep the women employed, it was “not tenable” to have three people sharing the one job.

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