News Briefs

Money matters
A new report has reinforced the importance of costs when clients are seeking out new law firms. The Legal Department Benchmarking Report 2010 involved research with more than 150 companies and government agencies that spend a combined total of more than $2 billion on legal costs a year. The report has been released by the Corporate Lawyers Association of New Zealand (CLANZ) and the Australian Corporate Lawyers Association (ACLA). It reveals that it is not just the size of legal fees that matters to clients - it is also the manner in which lawyers communicate fee structures and the timely reporting of unexpected overruns. With the general counsel of some of Australasia's biggest organisations responding to the survey, it was found that only one in three reported that law firms met budget more than half the time. And the final cost of a project was consistently on or below budget just 4 per cent of the time.

Mental scars
The 2009 Australian of the Year, Professor Patrick McGorry, has urged law firms to rethink their "19th-century working environment" in the interests of tackling high levels of depression in the sector. Speaking at the recent Tristan Jepson Memorial Foundation 2010 annual lecture, he indicated that mental health issues within the legal fraternity may be linked to the workplace culture of firms. "(A law firm) is a 19th-century working environment," McGorry said. "Twenty-first century working environments promote autonomy, mastery and purpose. People who are mentally healthy in their work have ... freedom over the way they work, they've got  a sense of mastery over what they do, they're not in an out-of-control, treadmill-type situation and they've got a sense of purpose and social value. A lot of the more creative occupational roles that are opening up these days have got these features. There is much greater flexibility ... There are obviously different ways of being a lawyer, but many of the ways don't seem to have these features."

Deep cuts
Recruitment group Hudson has suggested that businesses in Australia may have cut "muscle" from their ranks rather than "fat" in response to staff redundancies during the economic downturn. A survey that Hudson commissioned sought responses from 605 employers and 1690 employees across Australia and New Zealand. It found that 84 per cent of employers across both countries conceded they had made too many redundancies during the financial crisis and many now lacked people power. Both employers and employees commented that their teams are under-resourced in the aftermath of the cuts. Hudson suggests that employers must now try to bolster both the size and strength of their teams so that they can compete effectively in their markets.

Helping out
The National Pro Bono Resource Centre has reported that large Australian law firms continue to be strong advocates of pro bono legal work, despite the impact of the global financial crisis.  Firms that have signed up to the National Pro Bono Aspirational Target have on the whole performed more pro bono work for disadvantaged people and community non-profit organisations than those firms which have not yet signed it. The findings show that while the number of fee earners in the top 12 firms decreased by 13.3 per cent over the past two years, the amount of pro bono work that these firms performed grew during the same period. Twenty-nine of the 39 Australian firms with more than 50 lawyers responded to the survey. Of those that provided data, they indicated that their lawyers performed an average of 29 hours a year on pro bono work.

Gender imbalance
The Australian newspaper's annual survey of the 35 leading law firms suggests that the proportion of women promoted to partnership at leading firms is on the decline. The report shows that women accounted for just 21.9 per cent of all new partners promoted in the past six months, down from 26.8 per cent a year earlier. It also found that the choice of firm has a large bearing on the prospects of female lawyers. Gilbert & Tobin holds the top spot in the survey as Australia's most female-friendly law firm. At the time of the survey, women held 36.4 per cent of partnerships at the Sydney-based firm.