Following on from our posts profiling the Freehills Leading Practices Review (being the review in which Freehills management has sought to grow profitability through the excision of various unspecified, apparently unprofitable groups), we can today report the rumour that the first serious casualty of the Review has been suffered.
According to an anonymous Freehills spy yesterday:
Freehills Leading Practice Review rolls on. The entire Superannuation Group from Freehills Melbourne is leaving for Landers and Rogers. Another underperforming practice group nailed as it is not core to the business. One imagines their counterparts in Sydney office, where there is a large group of partners, are somewhat nervous.
Nervous indeed. We wrote to Freehills’ Chief Executive Partner and media person yesterday asking for clarification on the issue, but have so far been met with uncharacteristic silence. Perhaps they all fear for the chest hair of the departing Freehillites?
We were also keen to get clarity from the firm on whether junior lawyers at the firm finding themselves in the Superannuation Group – lawyers who potentially accepted a position at Freehills in preference to a position at another top-tier firm and – were offered a position in an alternate Freehills group. Again, no response to this query was forthcoming.
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So Freehills is trying to increase profitability by culling practices! A firm’s greatest asset is its people and IP. Obviously not Freehills. Decreasing expenses by say, moving out of the most expensive building in Melbourne is a better initiative.
If Freehills is looking to become a lean, mean corporate firm ripe for international merger – think again. UK firms are capable of retaining their range of practices, pay their partners more than Australian firms and still have sufficient capital in the bank to launch expansion and merger plans in Asia-Pacific.
Doubtful that they would be interested in a top tier Australian firm that can’t even manage profitability in their own local market. More likely, as with Allen & Overy they’ll poach the heads they want and leave the top-tiers with their high-fixed costs and poor internal management alone.