Mills Oakley: Why clients want credibility from firms The crowded Australasian legal services market has placed clients in the box seat when it comes to reviewing panel arrangements, cutting old ties and building new relationships with firms. While there have been many new market entrants in the past ten years, there is nothing new about the values which underscore a healthy firm-client relationship: credibility, reliability and trust. Mills Oakley CEO John Nerurker says that credibility is one of the first things clients look for in a firm. “Clients have a great deal of autonomy in deciding which firms to brief, but in our experience the flipside is that they also want to be able to justify that decision internally if the need arises.” Nerurker continues: “So they want to be comfortable that they would be able to explain to their board, or their management, why they chose to engage a particular law firm.” Mills Oakley has 30 ASX 200 clients, has been recognised in the Asia Pacific Legal 500 and is a member of the Commonwealth Government’s Legal Services Multi-Use List, all facts which the firm regularly references in its pitches to clients. “Our objective is to make it easier for clients to find the kind of information they need to make an appropriate business case within their organisation for using Mills Oakley,” says Nerurker. The second issue which Nerurker says that clients regularly raise is scale. “Again, I think this ties in with the question of credibility,” he says. “You might have a firm which looks terrific on paper; the partners might be first class. But if it’s a small firm and they’re swamped, or someone has gone on leave, the client is left high and dry – not a great look for anyone when there’s a critical transaction
needing to be completed. That’s why clients regularly ask about our bench strength. They know that lawyers are human; they get sick, they move roles – they want to know that their firm can handle all these challenges yet still provide a high level service.” Mills Oakley has 60 partners and over 350 staff based in Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. The firm has consistently been named as one of the fastest growing law firms in Australia by both the legal and mainstream press over the past eight years. “We’re proud of our growth story, but we also think there is a very practical benefit for clients to work with a firm with our scale,” says Nerurker. “What it means is that clients can have confidence that when they engage us, they are engaging a firm with the depth of resourcing to cope with the peaks and troughs of their requirements.” Depth of resourcing – and particularly quality resourcing - may be something typically associated with traditional top tier firms, but times have changed. There is no longer any reason to pay top tier rates for top tier service. This issue is a passion for Nerurker, who has spent his ten years at the helm of Mills
John Nerurker CEO, Mills Oakley
Oakley building a formidable talent base lured from leading international and top tier firms. “Our experts in our leading practice areas are of the same calibre as those in tier one firms,” says Nerurker. “The difference is that you won’t be paying tier one rates at Mills Oakley. We don’t have the usual large firm overheads, and our clients are the direct beneficiaries of this.” Credibility, bench strength and value for money: these are the three values which place Mills Oakley in good stead to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving market. “We’ve been serving clients for 150 years, and we hope to be doing that for another 150 years into the future,” concludes Nerurker.