Piper Alderman managing partner Gordon Grieve believes that litigation work has a long way to go to reach its peak after the GFC and points to the recession in the late 1980s as evidence that there will be strong demand in the practice area for years to come.

“I’ve got no doubt it will stay strong,” Grieve said, citing the many litigations that continued throughout most of the 1990s after the collapses in 1987 and 1989. “The big corporate collapses breed a significant amount of litigation as time goes by and we still haven’t seen the peak of it at all yet – there’ll be a lot of litigation next year,” he said.

In anticipation of that work coming through, Piper Alderman has announced 16 promotions across the firm in areas including corporate, property and employment relations. However, 10 of the promotions were to the dispute resolution team, including that of Sasha Ivantsoff who was made partner in the firm’s Sydney office. Grieve said that about 50% of Piper Alderman’s business comes through litigation but that the focus in this round of promotions is a direct result of the GFC.

“We’ve always been a strong litigation firm but obviously over the last 12-18 months litigation has been booming so we’ve channeled more graduates into litigation than to others,” he said.

Grieve is also expecting corporate and property to pick up in the New Year. “We’re certainly getting that feedback from our clients,” he said. “They’re preparing themselves to be ready to go in February when people get back from their holidays.”

Piper Alderman’s approach to promoting from within is a legacy left over from the times before the credit crunch when good experienced lawyers were hard to find. Grieve said that it forced the firm into implementing a sophisticated graduate recruitment program to try and get talent early and keep it long term.

“It really came out of the difficult market for lawyers before the financial crash and it was difficult to laterally hire three- or four-year lawyers that were in demand and going overseas,” Grieve said. “So we have had a program of bringing these people on ourselves and this is really a culmination of a number of years’ work that we’ve been able to promote this number of people from within.”