- business class travel will be prohibited for everyone other than partners and heads of business services
- having the firm pay for taxis home after hours is now contingent on a “high billable hours” requirement
We hate to break it to you guys, but skimping on firm benefits is not going to cancel out the shock swindling by ex-CFO Craig Raneberg, who was apparently recently arrested.
The spy goes on to comment:
Given the same-day turn around policy for nearly all firm travel, it’s going to be interesting to see how lawyers handle several hours in the cheap seats, before a full day of work and then a flight home. The partners’ greed knows no bounds!
We can hear a thousand miniature violins playing to mourn the loss of business class travel, but the taxi policy sounds like fairly cynical cost-cutting to us. Isn’t the whole point of an “after hours” taxi service that you’ve been required to stay behind late on work matters? Whether or not the person concerned has high billables on other days is surely irrelevant, unless the firm is simply taking the view that less productive staff members don’t “deserve” a free ride home. Any Minters spies care to comment?
Then again, maybe Minters should simply have encouraged a taxi sharing policy.
What is the taxi policy at your firm?
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Taxi sharing? I’d prefer to walk than be forced to sit in a cab with some random colleague to talk about the weather. Both policies sound reasonable, except for when you are having a quiet day and get work dumped on you at 4.30pm that keeps you back late. In those circumstances it would be possible to have low hours but a late night. That said, any half reasonable partner wouldn’t knock back a recipe in such circumstances.
We have a policy of handing out as many cab charges as possible at the start of the night (usually a work function) and then bartering them later on for free drinks, favours or free rides home.
Page 22 of the Clayton Utz Annual Review 2011, under “achievements in numbers” – 800 tram tickets issued in place of taxi vouchers to Melbourne staff, saving around one tonne of CO2 emissions.
It’s an ACHIEVEMENT!
Are you stupid? The South Australian CFO has nothing to do with the broader Minter Ellison partnership – SA is a franchise firm and not part of the broader partnerships profit share. So it was either ignorant or mischevious to try to link them.
In terms of the high billable requirement for the taxis, I would assume that it refers to having “high billables” on the day in question. This is reasonable because as you say the right / privilege to a taxi home should be because “you’ve been required to stay behind late on work matters”.
If you haven’t got high billables it is unlikely that you were required to stay late because of work matters – indeed some lawyers were known to charge taxis home after they went to the gym in the afternoon.
The one accurate point in your article was “[w]hether or not the person concerned has high billables on other days is… irrelevant”. I’m sure you will find that is the case under the revised policy too.
The coffee machine in the Minters Brisbane office has not been functioning for 6 months!
Hmmm… aren’t the taxi’s there for safety reasons to make sure people get home safe after being required to stay back?
The taxi policy would be the last thing I’d be tightening in the name of cost-cutting were I a partner at Minters (or any other tight-arsed law firm for that matter). It’s all very well to quibble about employees’ entitlements to after hours taxis when it comes time to formulating a new ‘policy’. But what happens when that lawyer dumped with a last minute job at the tail end of a quiet day – and we all know it happens – gets assaulted (or worse) walking back to the train station late at night? Will those whose greed is to blame be brave enough to front up before that lawyer’s family and explain that she (or he) was a couple of billable hours short of qualifying for a taxi that night?
Taxis for working late aren’t a privilege, it’s to stop the firm getting sued when your articled clerk gets smacked in the face on the Pakenham line on their way home at 9.30pm.
As for business class travel – get over it, the rest of the world manages with a seat up the back.
@ Nasty Cyril
No risk of that, Minters lawyers are too stunningly hot for anyone to attack … mere mortals can only stare and drool as they stroll by
bugger safety – at least as important with taxis us the recognition that when you’ve been stuck at work, you just want to get home a quickly and easily as humanly possible.