One of our Sydney sources has highlighted an interesting piece published in the Australian Financial Review today about an email exchange between partners in the banking practice at Australian law firm Mallesons…..
The Australian Financial Review article reveals an email exchange between the two Mallesons partners in their banking practice where they talk about 14 lawyers they were considering making redundant. The article also revealed that everybody in the banking practice is getting harder performance evaluations.
Sorry.. but we are unable to supply you with a link to this article because the AFR is a subscription only website. You’ll need to hotfoot it down to the nearest newsagent or beg borrow steal a copy.
Our source also gathers from informal conversations with Mallesons contacts in Sydney that many of the banking ‘regulation’ lawyers are now casting around very hard for work after doing nothing for several months.
Our source has also learnt that Mallesons have circulated an internal email today in response to the AFR article saying that there was ‘nothing strange about the performance evaluations’ but not mentioning the part of the article that talked about potentially redundant lawyers
Unfortunately we have been unable to get our greasy little fingers on a copy of this email.
This little fable highlights a point we made in an earlier post today about the somewhat secretive nature of some Australian partnerships. The majority of US & UK firms have been pretty open about the current situation for banking practices ( it’s not really rocket science) and if they can’t re-allocate their lawyers they’ve been fairly straightforward about what decisons regarding layoffs need to be made.
It looks fairly likely that Mallesons will be laying people off .. let’s hope that they don’t decide to to do it in the 24 hours leading up to Christmas eve
