03
To the anonymous barrister who messaged Firm Spy - without leaving an email address - please get in touch with an email address as we’d like to hear from you.
Also, to the ex-Shine Lawyers employee - yes, you can definitely be of assistance - but we need your contact details too. Please email us again and leave them!
30
You will soon notice small changes emerging on Firm Spy. We are gradually going to update the site to give it a new look and feel. You will notice the new share buttons on the bottom of each post (please share with your friends!) - these are the first of some larger changes that you will soon see.
A couple of weeks ago we asked our readers to sign up to our weekly newsletter. This is something that will also be changing soon; there will be articles that feature in our newsletter that do not appear on www.firmspy.com. So if you want to stay abreast of all of our latest news and gossip, be sure to sign up! To do so, please type your email address in the column to the right underneath the apt heading “weekly newsletter”. Be sure to click the “subscribe” button too.
Despite changes to Firm Spy, the content of our posts will of course remain the same.
This brings us to the iPhone App.
It is not an app in the traditional sense, but it is the best thing we could muster given the very tight and finite resources at our disposal.
Instructions:
- open Safari on your iPhone;
- go to www.firmspy.com;
- press the “+” sybmol at the bottom of the safari browser;
- select “add to home screen”;
- confirm by selecting “add” in the top right corner of the page.
The Firm Spy “app” should then pop up.
In due course, the app will be optimised for anonymous tip submissions, meaning all our readers can contribute at any time of day without fear of being monitored from work computers.
So get in touch!
30
We spent a reasonable chunk of the last 48 hours researching the difference between journalism and communications/public relations. No, we’re not “communications professionals”, so a bit of research was necessary.
For thoe unitiated, communications/PR staff are employed by many professional services firms primarily to shape public perceptions of their firm in positive ways. Part of this role involves regular interaction with journalists: Comms/PR staff are experts in dealing with journalists. They often provide journalists with an “official” comment from the firm on a particular news item which invariably results in the firm being positively perceived in any subsequent news article.
Websites like Lawyers Weekly, ALB and The New Lawyer are industry paragons in this regard. These sites regularly show how competent communications professionals can shape journalist reportage in ways that are positive for the firm in question (by the way, a big congrats to Lawyers Weekly on its 500th edition - click here to check it out!).
Such is the tremendous importance of PR that Bill Gates once said:
If I only had two dollars left I would spent one dollar on PR.
And Bill knows a thing or two about how to spend cash!
Although it is one thing for a communications professional to competently fulfil their job description by dealing with journalists, it is entirely a different thing for comms staff to comment on the relevance of our site from the perspective of the firm’s employees and to dictate to those employees what is “worthy of their attention”. Neither PR staff nor partners in firms have any business dictating to their staff what they should read and what they should not. They do not possess the professional competence even to provide guidance in this regard because it is purely a matter of opinion.
As unprofessional communicators, we understand that the communications professional previously forming the subject matter of this post was probably either acting according to the instructions of her superiors, or simply indulging in a frolic outside the scope of her professional competence.
We think 2 tough days was enough.
No doubt this information will soon be worthy enough to come to her attention!
27
Today’s embarrassing firm website award goes to… Von Dousass, an Adelaide-based commercial firm. One of our eagle-eyed Tipsters noticed this gem among the coveted, but seldom read, ‘our people’ pages:
“Tamara is an admininstrative [sic] assistant, or a clerk or something and she does a good job.”
Looking past the misspelling of ‘administrative’, as our tipster commented, “This firm really cares for their support staff. “ Too right. Then again, at least this firm’s support staff actually get a profile at all! But perhaps the firm should have asked Tamara to proofread the website profiles - we’re sure she would have done a better job.
24
Firm Spy cannot guarantee the veracity of the figures quoted in this post
Today brings the third and by far the biggest installment of our Firm Spy 2010 Remuneration Survey series. We have had some comments and emails relating to various aspects of our survey, including, amongst other things, the sample size and the means by which we can ensure that dodgy entries aren’t included. And unlike the firms themselves, we wanted to answer these questions and respond to these criticisms directly.
Essentially, we have no real way of ensuring that results are accurate. In fact, we suspect that a group of HR staff from one major firm (who we wont name, but no doubt many of you will guess) intentionally sought to distort the results recorded such that we would publish incorrect salary information from that firm. Yes, the lengths that firms will go to in order to keep salaries secret are that extreme!
So other than the top tier salaries - about which we are quite confident given higher sample sizes and less variation between the samples from the same year and office - we are not very confident that our results are accurate (by reason either of intentional firm distortion, a small sample size, mistake or a combination of all three).
For precisely this reason, we have decided today to publish all year levels of all mid tier firms across Australia from the graduate year through to 3-4 years PQE. These are the firms where the salary results are most open to doubt based on small sample sizes (in many cases only one sample), plus there is always the issue that the salaries we have published based on that low sample size are drawn from the low or high end of a salary band. In some circumstances, where there are major discrepancies between samples, we have published more than one salary. This could be the “low” and “high” ends of a salary band; it could be a mistake; or it could be a dodgy result engineered by an evil HR rep. We don’t know.
But heck, we thought we should give you all something to read and gossip about during a slow news week!
Melbourne
Graduates
- Norton Rose - 65,000
- Herbert Geer - 58,000
0-1 Years PQE
- Arnold Bloch Leibler - 79,000
- Norton Rose - 70,000
- Baker & McKenzie - 67,000
1-2 Years PQE
No Responses
2-3 Years PQE
- DLA Phillips Fox - 75,000/92,000
- Baker & McKenzie - 78,000/90,000
- Mills Oakley - 75,000
- Corrs Chambers Wesgarth - 93,000
3-4 Years PQE
- Holding Redlich - 95,000
- Norton Rose - 80,000/105,000
- DLA Phillips Fox - 88,000
- Landers - 95,000
- Corrs Chambers Wesgarth - 108,000
Sydney
Graduates
- Baker & McKenzie - 70,000
- Piper Alderman - 58,000
- Corrs Chambers Wesgarth - 72,000
0-1 Years PQE
- Holding Redlich - 72,000
- Corrs Chambers Wesgarth - 73,000/79,000
1-2 Years PQE
- Corrs Chambers Wesgarth - 89,000
- Norton Rose - 82,000
2-3 Years PQE
- Johnson Winter Slattery - 82,000
- Middletons - 92,000
- Piper Alderman - 72,500/80,000
- HWL Ebsworth - 85,000
- Corrs Chambers Wesgarth - 87,000
- Norton Rose - 85,000/88,000
- Gadens - 73,000
3-4 Years PQE
- HWL Ebsworth - 90,000
- Thomson Playford Cutlers - 77,000
- Baker & McKenzie - 98,000
Brisbane
Graduates
- HWL Ebsworth - 50,000
0-1 Years PQE
- DLA Phillips Fox - 68,000
- Norton Rose - 68,000
1-2 Years PQE
- Herbert Geer - 78,000
- DLA Phillips Fox - 73,000
2-3 Years PQE
- DLA Phillips Fox - 77,000
Perth
- Corrs Chambers Wesgarth - 2-3 years PQE - 83,000
- Norton Rose - 2-3 years PQE - 107,000
- DLA Phillips Fox - 2-3 years PQE - 77,000
- Middletons - 3-4 years PQE- 105,000
19
Over the weekend, a number of Firm Spies were talking about the forthcoming BRW Top 500 Report, due out in a couple of weeks. We think it is going to make some excellent reading; revenue statistics are probably the most important metric we can use when assessing corporate behaviour (or, more particularly for our purposes, misbehaviour).
We then stumbled onto an excellent report compiled by Smart Company (using information from IBISWorld) on the Australian legal services industry. The report predicts that the legal services industry will grow by just 3.5% in 2009/2010 to $21.8 billion. The report explains that the Big 6 Australian law firms - Mallesons Stephen Jaques; Freehills; Minter Ellison; Clayton Utz; Allens Arthur Robinson; and Blake Dawson - account for over 13% of industry revenue. The report noted:
Revenue in the legal services industry is expected to increase by 20.6% to $26.3 billion over the five years to 2014-15, which will represent an average increase of 3.8% per annum. Unlike the 1980s and 1990s when firms enjoyed strong demand for services as a result of financial deregulation and micro-economic reform, there does not seem to be any policy or law reform of that scale on the agenda in the coming five years. Environmental laws, particularly those relating to climate change, along with financial regulation in the wake of the global financial crisis may represent the most significant area of reform over the coming five years.
These growth forecasts will no doubt come as a rude shock to firms that in recent (pre-GFC) years have enjoyed double-digit revenue growth. But with partnership salaries that are already so overinflated, was this just another bubble that had to burst?
According to IBISWorld, the success of law firms over the next 3-4 years will be based on the following factors:
- Proximity to key markets: being in a highly visible location conveys a sense of prestige and expertise.
- Having a well-defined strategy/goal: having a marketing plan to generate new clients; focusing on servicing a small number of large clients, or a large number of small clients.
- Access to quality personnel management: having a maximum ratio of around one partner to four staff; offering competitive remuneration to attract quality partners.
- Provision of development programs for personnel: having a structured training program for all staff.
- Ability to effectively manage risk: having adequate professional indemnity insurance coverage.
- Well developed internal processes: having professional management practice systems, which includes cashflow management, the introduction of appropriate time management systems, a job costing system, etc.
- Access to niche markets: specialising in growing areas of the law rather that offering services covering all areas of the law.
- Automation - reduces costs, particularly those associated with labour: using new technology to assist labour productivity.
How leveraged is your firm? Our guess is that the absolute ceiling of four staff to one partner is greatly exceeded. So if you look at your colleagues beside you, who will stay and who will go? Is it going to be a case of Darwinian “survival of the fittest”?
18
Firm Spy cannot guarantee the veracity of the figures quoted in this post
Last week we published the first installment of the Firm Spy Salary Survey - revealing top-tier graduate salaries across Australia. Today brings the second installment of in this series. We turn to the top-tier first years; the lowly workers who can now finally do some trolley-pushing delegation of their own!
As we move up through the year bands, the figures we report will likely become less accurate. Performance bands within year levels emerge even at the first-year stage, so lawyers at the same firm with precisely the same handful of months of experience may, nevertheless, be remunerated differently. This doesn’t mean that the figures below are necessarily incorrect, just that as we move forward through year bands, the figure you’re looking at might be at the high-end or low-end (or even the median) of a salary band .
From the perspective of junior employees, the existence of discrepant pay levels within a year salary band is a major nuisance. Moreover, when a junior lawyer at firm 1 compares their paltry new salary to a higher salary that is paid to an equivalently experienced employee at firm 2, and the lawyer from firm 1 thereafter communicates that information to their partner, the partner is simply able to dismiss the discrepancy by saying “the lawyer at firm 2 is obviously paid at the ‘high-end’ of the salary band’. Once partners have deflected this initial barrage of underpayment criticism in this way, their hope is that the issue will “go away”. And it usually does.
However, the Firm Spy is informed (by an anonymous source, as well as in the comments to yesterday’s post) that the Mallesons partnership has had less than its usual success this year in using this strategem to deflect pay concerns of junior lawyers. It is rumoured that partners have in recent weeks moved to stem the losses of junior lawyers moving elsewhere for higher salaries by embarking upon another salary review. A number of junior lawyers are believed to have had their salaries adjusted as a result.
Now, onto the figures! As you will note below, we still need more help. If you know any other salaries that are missing, please either email us at news@firmspy.com or fill in the survey here.
Top Tier First Year Salaries 2010
Melbourne
- Freehills - $72,000
- Mallesons Stephen Jaques - $72,000
- Allens Arthur Robinson - $71,000
- Clayton Utz - $72,000
- Blake Dawson - $74,000
- Minter Ellison - $68,500
Sydney
- Clayton Utz - $73,000
- Mallesons Stephen Jaques - $78,000
- Freehills - $80,000
- Minter Ellison - $75,000
- Blake Dawson - $77,000
Brisbane
- Blake Dawson - $70,000
- Freehills - $71,000
- Allens Arthur Robinson - $68,000
Perth
- Mallesons Stephen Jaques - $74,000
- Blake Dawson - $70,000
The figures we have quoted are inclusive of super but exclusive of bulk-discounted items that the firm pays for (and attributes the RRP value to) like gym memberships and miscellaneous benefits.
How does your firm stack up? Is it time to put more pressure on?
04
In a slightly slower news week like this one, we were pleased that a meteor knocked us off our usual space-flight trajectory with an email allegedly penned by ANZ CEO Mike Smith and sent to all staff a few weeks ago landing in our inbox. The allegedly leaked email gives a Big Bang an explosive account of the dark matter darker corners one of Australia’s largest institutions.
The following comes from an anonymous ANZ spy:
staff engagement levels are falling rapidly at ANZ. Quite a turnaround from the industry highs only 2 years ago, as many senior managers & middle level staff continue to leave the business. The following message comes from CEO Mike Smith:
Thursday 15 July 2010
Dear colleagues,
I am pleased to share with you the results of the 2010 My Voice employee survey which was completed in May. As you know, last year we introduced a new survey which measures both engagement and performance excellence to give us a rounded view of how we are travelling as an organisation.
Overall, the survey indicates that 64% of our staff feel positively engaged with ANZ and what it means to work here and 68% feel positive about our level of commitment to product and service quality, measured as ‘performance excellence’. Employee engagement measured how our people feel about work and the extent to which they are motivated to contribute to our shared success. It measures pride, satisfaction, advocacy and commitment to ANZ. The survey measured the four key components of employee engagement:
- 63% of staff are satisfied with this organisation as a place to work (satisfaction); (64% in 2009)
- 51% rarely think about looking for a new job with another company (commitment); (54% in 2009)
- 74% would gladly refer a good friend or family member to this organisation for employment (advocacy); (71% in 2009)
- 75% are proud to say they work for this organisation (pride); (75% in 2009)
I want to be upfront and say that neither of these measures are where we want to be as an organisation. Engagement has slightly declined since last year (66% in 2009). While the experts tell me this is not ‘statistically significant’, the bottom line for me is it’s still below the benchmark for the global financial services industry and that’s not something we can accept.
What our survey results tell us is that we need to do much more work in both engagement and performance excellence if we are going to achieve the aspirations we have set for ourselves and how we want to interact with our customers. Although the survey shows that engagement among our senior leaders is improving, we’re seeing a plateau for our middle managers and a slight decline among our less senior staff which we need to look at closely. You’ve also told us that we should be doing more to improve our products and services and the way we deal with customer issues. I completely agree.
On the upside, your experiences in your local teams are positive, with evidence of strong relationships with managers, people feeling that they are part of a team and involved in decision making. I recognise that we have all been working very hard this year and some of you may be feeling pretty tired. We’ve asked a lot of you and you have stepped up and delivered. I want to acknowledge and thank you for that. Our survey results will feed into action plans at the Group, business and team levels right across ANZ. All line managers will be encouraged to develop an action plan to address issues and build on opportunities in their teams.
I’m looking forward to My Voice being a regular topic of conversation at Management Board and among the leadership teams throughout ANZ. It is an important opportunity to listen to your feedback, lift our game and create even more momentum towards our super regional goal. Finally, my thanks to the nearly 30,000 members of our global team who completed the survey – I greatly appreciate you taking the time to share your views and I assure you they have been heard and that I’ll continue to update you as we take actions to address engagement and performance excellence within ANZ.
Regards,
Mike Smith
Perhaps the collective heads of ANZ senior staff are on Mars in the clouds?
Do you have any explosive work-related emails that will send the Firm Spy on another space-odyssey?
05
To have the ticker to pump decent pay rises into employee hearts and minds, partners must have enough blood money in the bank to share. That, or the promise or reasonable certainty of money to come. There must be blood in their veins, so to speak.
To this end, there can be little doubt that top-tier firm Mallesons was in an excellent position last week to send pulses racing with some bloody good pay reviews for staff. The firm:
So staff were understandably hemorrhaging when they apparently received less than sanguine pay reviews last week. We received many emails from anonymous Mallesons spies over the weekend. We have chosen not to publish all of them because the sentiment is clear from those published below:
First this:
Mallesons consistently underpays its staff. It coats its position with a veneer of false legitimacy by artificially deflating the performance ratings of strong performers, and linking pay to those artificially deflated ratings. The partners are simply oblivious to what market salaries really are, and they don’t seem to want to retain strong performers. What makes me sad? The fact that I like my partner, but am going to have to leave the firm in order to earn the salary I’m worth.
Artifical ratings to justify low pay? Sounds familiar and very believable. We later received this from an anonymous Mallesons spy:
Dear Firmspy,
This outrage just has to be reported. I’m writing anonymously, but please don’t try to find out my identity. I’m scared of what the partners will do. I’m too scared to even talk to my partner about pay. Some news about the Day of Dollars/Dolours at Mallesons in Sydney. Well it’s official. Mallesons has stooped to an even more indefensible level of stinginess, with the announcement of a round of absolutely ridiculous pay increases, particularly for 3-4 year solicitors. There was no double-band increase. There wasn’t even a single-band increase. There was nothing more than a pile of sh*t rolled into a some thin rectangles and stuffed into an envelope.
A 3-4 year solicitor at Mallesons now earns on average a wretched $90k-$92k including superannuation, up from the $84k they have earned since July 2008. That’s an embarrassing raise of about 7% over 2 years, which barely accounts for inflation over that time. And let’s not forget that target billable requirements have also gone up to 7 hours per day. So Bobby M’s pathetic pay rise is, for all practical purposes, a pay cut. Note the plosive alliteration to symbolise disdain.
There were tantrums, tears and chests brimming with ire as rem review letters were passed out throughout the day. Partners faced a barrage of complaints which they batted away with self-satisfied smugness on their way out the door to go home and bathe in their profits in the style of Scrooge McDuck. Or should that be McF—k? Meanwhile, in contrast to the 7% log-of-turd hurled at 3-4 year solicitors by the partners, 4-5 year lawyers scored a 15% bump-up. Still, that leaves lawyers on the verge of SA-ship earning about $100,000 including superannuation. Very few of them are happy. Not that there are many of them left at the firm. Why is it that the 3-4 years got so royally screwed? Will a HR lackey from Busta’s team try to explain in the comments section? Firmspy, you simply cannot understand the extent of the anger and resentment felt by the victims of this unjustifiable exercise in partnerly flipping-the-bird. Do the partners want all the 3-4 years to leave? Because that’s what’s going to happen. It’s all anyone could talk about: recruiters, CVs, Freehills…
Then this:
Pathetically anemic and below-market salary raises at Mallesons today, even for top performers. Same lame old justifications from the partners about “challenging economic conditions” (cue violins!). People are absolutely livid and the revolving door will start spinning any minute now. Note to Mallesons partners- if we are intelligent enough to do your drudge work, we are sure as hell sufficiently smart to work out what we’re worth in the market and when we are being blatantly low-balled and taken advantage of.
Perhaps its time for Mallesons employees to give partners a coronary by simply taking a few days off work? Could a large group of disgruntled junior workers band together, as blood-brothers, and decline to work until partners get pay right?
02
A few weeks ago, you’ll recall the sermon we delivered in respect of Deloitte Chief Giam Sweigers’ “favourite management mottos”. We read Giam’s commandments mottos, immediately took the Lord’s name in vain, and thereafter made a religious vow to do whatever we could to spread stop His messages.
For those who’ve forgotten, in a staggering BRW article, Giam variously exclaimed:
“Try new things, but fail fast and fail cheaply.”
“Soft on people, tough on performance.”
“Leadership is not about taking people where they want to go, it’s about taking people where they should go. It’s not a popularity contest.”
In our minds this immediately evoked the image of a Papal assembly, huddled beneath a Vatican window, devouring to the words of a religious leader.
But have the Deloitte masses been listening? Apparently, yes!
We received the following comments from an anonymous Deloitte spy a couple of weeks ago:
Firm Spy,
Here at Deloitte, our leader Giam Swiegers constantly bothers us with his whimsical, stream-of-consciousness “messages”. When I say “messages”, I mean that every day, almost without fail, we receive a voicemail (an innovative communication tool from Deloitte management that, for some reason, they believe is more powerful than conventional email) from Giam giving us spiritual guidance and his thoughts for the day. Among the various nuisances he delivers to us on a day-to-day basis, are the homages he pays to arcane religious holidays like “happy-Martyrdom-of-Guru-Tegh-Bahadur-Ji-day”. I wish I was joking.
“Prayer time”, as a few of us call it, has been done to death. But the final straw came earlier this year when Giam failed to recognise ANZAC Day. Yes, despite recounting every single religious holiday - including all those observed by the people who entered “Jedi” [as their chosen religion] in the national census - Giam forgot to mention the one that really matters.
Holy moly - Giam forgot ANZAC Day!
But the blasphemous employee reproach does not stop there. We received the following biblically proportioned spray from another Deloitte spy a few days ago:
As part of its much awaited remuneration process, Deloitte has once again delivered very little on its promises. After the convoluted messages of the past and subsequent pay freezes, much is expected… and as is usually the case there is very little. High volumes of staff received nil payrises with the average being less than 5% in a period where partner distributable profit has increased by 22% and 11% revenue growth. Just to reinforce that staff are just that… staff. An email was sent by Giam advising that we are the 14th best place to work in Australia. Clearly the vote was taken well before news of the payrise hit but rather was done at a time when there was strong rhetoric that we would be rewarded for what have been some hard years. Thanks Giam.
Yes, a well-timed psalm that one! These comments were given a blessing by the following words, sent by yet another Deloitte preacher:
hi guys, Apparently the Deloitte payletters just came out very recently for the Audit and Assurance staff… the word is senior analysts were very very disappointed…
By “disappointed”, do you think our Deloitte spy means that workers have lost their faith? Or is it time that they accepted a vow of poverty?
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