Well done to ALB for wringing the minimum of information out of a couple of Australian managing partners about changes at their firms as the downturn begins to affect Australian lawyers in a more direct manner….
Yesterday ALB posted the following story
Cost control: firms look to run a tighter ship
Managing a firm in a downturn means managing expense. But as firms tell ALB, that’s not necessarily a bad thing
It is possible, we’re told, to gauge the state of Australia’s economy from the difficulty one encounters in securing a reservation at Melbourne’s more salubrious restaurants. And, according to one partner in the know, the prognosis is not good. Whether justified or not, the perception is that times will become yet leaner. Fiscal responsibility has, therefore, become the order of the day.
Discretionary costs
The downturn provides an opportunity for firms to do the housekeeping they were too busy to do in boom times, said Holding Redlich managing partner Chris Lovell. "There are a lot of totally discretionary costs that we should have looked at before but we overlooked because everyone was too busy. Things like IT add-ons and tools which frankly I’m not sure people were using anyway. We have also postponed some IT upgrades and scaled back some marketing functions – we still have them, but not as many."
Lovell said that the firm has also made good savings by implementing proper inventory control over items such as stationery and food. "We’re careful not to upset the culture of the firm," he said. "We certainly don’t want to compromise the integrity and robustness of the business. But there were a lot of frills and fripperies for which there was no glaring demand."
See the full story at http://au.legalbusinessonline.com/contents/breaking-news/34078/1/details.aspx
HOB just spent last week in Sydney and the attitudes above reflect the ever persistant unreality in Australia about the state of the world’s economy and Australia’s place in it.
A PM who still refuses to use the R word, the media playing the …."We’re Aussie card… it’s not as bad here as it is in the rest of the world " and an opposition operating the tired blame game.
In the Australian legal industry attitudes are no different. Australian law firms, secretive at the best of times. Have, we’ve learnt only this week, been trying to layoff of staff as quietly as possible.
Only thanks to a source / whistleblower contacting Roll On Friday website in the UK do we know about this.
And now this ALB article talking about cost cutting ….. photocopying costs, taxis, lunches etc.
All well and good, but if we look at the wholesale layoffs at UK & US law firms at some point we must presume that partners at the bigger law firms in Australia are going to have to look at their staffing levels and make some unpleasant decisions that will be pretty hard to hide from the outside world.
