How many nuclear scientists does it take to run a law firm? Bill Fazio is in a better position than most to answer that particular question – his first degree was in nuclear physic and mathematics. “I have a pretty wide skills set – I’m the sort of person who takes cars to bits and I originally wanted to be an engineer,” Fazio recalls. A school careers counsellor steered the young Fazio away from that particular path and he found himself opting for maths and science.
It was the first step in an eclectic career path which has included a stint as an investment banker at Bankers Trust and long periods of service with the firms now known as Blake Dawson and Minter Ellison. It has been a circuitous path to Fazio’s current role at Herbert Geer and he has few regrets. In particular, he values the time spent on the other side of the proverbial lawyer-client fence: “I’ve been a client on a significant matter, I’m able to put myself in the client’s shoes,” he says. “A law firm can be a bit of a cocoon – it’s the real world, but not the whole real world. I’ve experienced the frustrations of using lawyers and the cost of using lawyers and it’s good to have experienced it rather than just theorising about it.”
Herbert Geer has been one of the movers and shakers of the east coast legal profession – the firm was named the second fastest growing law firm in Australasia in last year’s ALB Fast 10 survey and many felt that it was unlucky to miss out on the top place, which ALB controversially awarded to listed aggregate firm Integrated Legal Holdings. The firm’s most recent milestone was the two year anniversary of a merger with Brisbane firm Nicol Robinson Halletts – a move which Fazio says took some time to bed down. “It took about twelve months for people to genuinely and spontaneously see themselves as part of Herbert Geer rather than NRH with a different name – that’s something everyone had to work at,” he says.
The hardest part of the transformation, says Fazio, was the wholesale change taking place on a continuous basis across premises, teams, IT, branding and strategy. “While exciting, the constant change has required a careful focus on maintaining a clarity of purpose of all the constituent elements of the transformation. All our planning was around what we were expecting to be, not what we currently were,” he says.
Fazio describes Herbert Geer as “reasonably full service” in Sydney and Brisbane but says that there is still work to do in building up breadth and depth and a choice of partners to accommodate personal client preferences. “There is a point of critical mass of market awareness where the market knows you because the market keeps bumping into you. We have that in Melbourne, but we don’t have that depth of innate market awareness in Brisbane and Sydney just yet,” he says.
Expansion into other states is not being ruled out, but Fazio says the key priority is to finish the job in Sydney and Brisbane. “Now is not the best time to add to the “to do” list. If someone in, say, Perth came to us or a client wanted us there, we’d be interested. But it’s not a high priority - it’s on the list there somewhere,” he says.
Other firms have opted for a “bolt on” or associate office model for their national operations, but Fazio is a keen believer that a sharing of profits across offices is essential to team culture: “I believe that if you don’t have a stake in the outcome of the other offices, why would you care? You might care, if you’re a nice person, but would it really be a priority if it doesn’t have an impact on you?” he asks.
Needless to say, Herbert Geer will not be knocking on the doors of international firms in search of a merger just yet – although Fazio frankly admits that he is not sure what would happen if they came knocking on his door.
Market trends
Having worked at Blake & Riggall (now better known as Blake Dawson), Ellison Hewison & Whitehead (now better known as Minter Ellison) and Andersen Legal, Fazio is in a good position to comment on how the industry has changed and whether the wheel of history will turn again. Having observed the trend towards national firms and the formation of the “big six” in the 1980s and 1990s, he senses that the same trend is once again occurring in the mid-tier space.
It is interesting to hear Fazio talk of his time at Andersen Legal, one of several short-lived forays by accounting firms into the legal advisory space and for a time one of the world’s largest law firms. “I genuinely believe in the idea of a global law firm following global clients,” says Fazio. “Towards the end [of Andersen Legal] we were beginning to see real traction in Europe – I think internal client referrals made up half their work in Europe. If [that model] were still here today, I wonder how it would go in Australia, Asia, China – the idea has some merit.”
Out of the current crop of firms, Fazio says that he admires Mallesons “for their pursuit of excellence” and Gilbert + Tobin, “for the fact that everyone watches them.”
“He’s a very interesting guy,” Fazio says of Danny Gilbert. “He’s visionary, a game changer – everyone likes to watch that firm because they are out of the ordinary.”
Fazio is committed to keeping a distinctive culture at Herbert Geer and has always maintained that there is an optimum size a firm can reach to attain a depth of talent while retaining a collegiate feel. A small but interesting tradition at the firm is to give new partners a welcome pack including, amongst other things, champagne, (“for the great days”), and Panadol (“for the not so great.”) “ I think this reflects our down to earth approach to the realities of life in a service industry,” says Fazio. “We want it to be great but recognise this can’t always be the case.”
