Clients want more than dinner from deal lawyers: ex-PwC legal partner
Law firm clients want to see partners doing legal work on deals, not just “turning up for closing dinners”, says new Hamilton Locke partner hire Andrew Vincent.
Mr Vincent, who joins an exodus from PwC’s legal division, is one of five new partners at the rapidly growing law firm, which is touting a different way of doing legal work.
Ex-PwC partner Andrew Vincent: “This frees people up to do the legal work they enjoy for clients.”
Mr Vincent is joined by Damien Bourke, a former partner at Holding Redlich; Amelia Prokuda, formerly a director at Gadens; Elena Stojcevski, an ex-Corrs senior associate; and Kath Booth, who was a director at PwC.
Hamilton Locke has already hired 14 new partners this year, and increased its employee headcount to 374, from 239 in January.
The firm also added the most partners of any Australian law firm in 2021-22.
Mr Vincent said Hamilton Locke’s streamlined back office structure allowed partners to spend more time doing legal work for clients and less time tied up with bureaucracy and admin tasks.
The firm, established in 2018, does business under holding company HPX Group, rather than the traditional partnership model, and combines back office functions with its legal outsourcing business, Source.
“Because the firm was set up with a blank canvas, they could structure it with minimum bureaucracy. That admin would normally take up most of partners’ time, but this frees people up to do the legal work they enjoy for clients,” Mr Vincent said.
“And that’s good from a client perspective, because they want to see partners on deals actually doing the work.”
Mr Vincent said the commercial legal market was ripe for disruption, “with a small number of dominant players” in a “fairly closed market”.
“The
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