Law and politics seem to go together like love and marriage. Not only is the current prime minister a former lawyer, more than a quarter of the members in the last Federal parliament were former lawyers or studied law.  

Prime Minister Julia Gillard is a former Slater & Gordon partner. The firm is rich in political history, having been started by Bill Slater, a Labor attorney-general in the 1930s. Labor MP Richard Marles is also a former Slater & Gordon lawyer and there are three new Slater & Gordon staff seeking to be elected this Saturday (see table below). Senior members of the ministerial team such as Simon Crean, Stephen Smith, Nicola Roxson (Maurice Blackburn), Robert McClelland and Tony Bourke are all former lawyers too. Not to be outdone, the Liberal party has its fair share of lawyers, including deputy leader Julie Bishop (Clayton Utz), Joe Hockey (Corrs Chambers Westgarth), Christopher Pyne and Malcolm Turnbull.  

Principal lawyer at Slater & Gordon, James Higgins, said lawyers see politics as a natural extension of their work. “A lot of lawyers at Gordon & Slater work here because they want to advocate on behalf of working people...Politics is a further step in doing that,” he said. “Lawyers deal with ordinary people every day, and it is the same in politics.”  

He also cited the skills of lawyers such as information gathering and making succinct arguments as some of the advantages in lawyers going into politics. “Lawyers have the capacity to advocate and communicate large amounts of information in short easy-to-understand sentences,” he said.

In some electorates, the two major parties and the Greens are all fielding lawyer candidates. Sydney's eastern suburbs seat of Wentworth is one such example - both current member and Liberal MP Turnbull and Labor candidate Steven Lewis are lawyers and even went to the same high school (Sydney Grammar). Greens candidate Matthew Robertson is also a lawyer.