While many Australasian law firms remain reluctant to disclose partner profit and even revenue figures, Mallesons managing partner Stuart Fuller says that making these figures available is an important part of building a culture of trust.
"It's an issue of integrity not only outside the firm, but also inside the firm," he said. "You've got to have transparency around partner income, otherwise people will guess at what it is." Mallesons was one of many firms to implement a salary freeze during the GFC. "If you are making difficult choices around spending or salaries, transparency is important," said Fuller. "What we find is that when we're transparent to the people in the firm, particularly the senior lawyers, there is a much deeper level of understanding about why the firm is doing these things - rather than jumping to a suspicion that it's all around preserving partner profits."
Co-managing partner Tony O'Malley says that while it is difficult to completely dispel scepticism, the culture of openness has been generally positively received. "We had some of our senior associates together last week in Melbourne - there was a slide that showed that salaries over the last two years post GFC have actually moved in a more positive trend than profits - profits in fact went the other way," he said. "And you could see the surprised look on people's faces - part of it was the surprise that we were that transparent, but the other part was that they had assumed that the steps that we'd taken over the last few years were taken to preserve our profits at their expense. So I think they were pleasantly surprised that we'd actually backed them as a group even though we'd taken a bit of a hit."