Sir Robert Jones - Justice Wilson Landlord

Briefcase also reports on Justice Wilson’s new digs with Sir Robert Jones and the ex-jurists over at Bankside Chambers.  “I thought (Bankside) was named after the sheer volume of fees that must sluice through its ledger, is evidently named after a short street.  It’s certainly a lot better than  the name of the Wellington chambers first occupied by Kit Toogood, John Billington and Michael Reed QCs, unimaginatively and now even downright dangerously called “Marac Chambers”.  Naming a chambers after a finance company is like naming a doctors surgery after a social disease.  Bankside, however, has a cluster of former High Court and Court of Appeal judges, including Sir Ian Barker QC, Robert Fisher QC, Barry Paterson QC and David Williams QC. David Williams has developed a fabulously lucrative arbitration and mediation practice.  The developing role for retired or resigned senior judges to forge a new and highly lucrative career in arbitration and mediation is something to behold (as reported in last week’s NBR).  Deborah Hart, executive director of the Arbitrators’ and Mediators’ Institute told me there has been exponential growth in their work in recent years with no sign of abatement.  Partly, this has been the use of mediation in domestic and family disputes, including the Family Court’s early intervention programme, which has been used to ease the logjam of cases in the Family Court.  But so too has been the growth in construction disputes and others.

All of which augers well for former Supreme Court Justice Bill Wilson who must be the cookie-cutter model of the successful mediator and arbitrator, forgetting the odd career-wrinkle.  Now ensconced in Sir Robert Jones’ suite of offices in Wellington, highly salubrious surroundings as they are, the former litigator and Judge will be quietly setting about carving a successful niche in the arbitration field, all his worries behind him.

NZLS-ScreamingLawyer

At last, it appears that not only a lasting truce, but a full union between the Auckland District Law Society and the NZ Law Society is likely, according to NBR Briefcase’s John Bowie.  It’s not by any means sealed, but they’re talking and they have that feeling that This Could Be It.  True love, at last.  This is not just a meeting of presidents with frozen smiles and stiff handshakes, sort of Obama-meets-Ahmadinejad, but rather ‘lets-find-a-motel’.  It’s a full-on love-in.

But there are problems. Always are with these marriages and one of them is money.  What to do with the ADLS assets, largely made up of that very fine ADLS building?  And then there’s the question of what do to with the ADLS representative work, which the ADLS has made such a very good fist of for its local and growing list of national members as well.

But these are all issues that can be sorted and the combined diplomatic skills of presidents Temm and Fitzgibbon, combined with some pressure from their respective constituencies to get their act together will help forge an amalgamation or deal that will work.  The blame for the disconnect and bad blood can largely be laid at the feet of the time frame pressures imposed by the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act, combined with a degree of intransigence from Wellington.  Auckland’s “state of the nation” meeting occurs on 3 November.

Following the column’s discussion about branding issues, Mark Kirkland from Kirkland Enright emailed us with an article from branding experts about his firm, Kirkland Enright’s branding.  The firm’s mould-breaking website features cartoon characters and removes much of the stuffy, me-tooish aspects of many law firm sites and helps provide the competitive advantage that any good brand provides.  It’s good. It’s fun. It’s quirky.  But does it work?  The KE partners who all hail from large law firms wanted their new firm to stand out from the law crowd.  In a competitive market that’s a tough ask, but in a down market it’s even more tough.  But Kirkland Enright have prospered and built the practice in part, at least, because of their strong branding initiative.    It is, as one commentator noted, “a breath of fresh air”.

These gowns are the last cringing remnant of a practice of the law where to be a lawyer is to be a supplicant: ‘May it please Your Honour,’ and ‘If Your Honour pleases,’ ‘Your Honour’ and ‘My learned friend’. All this is the fawning debris of a stratified society in which the quality of the cloth was the quality of the wearer.

Haynes’ replacement is to be former Minter Ellison senior partner David Gascoigne whose appointment follows the recent appointment by Attorney General Chris Finlayson of his partner, lawyer and company director Patsy Reddy, to the Film Commission. David Gascoigne chaired the Commission for several years. The breakfast conversation at their waterfront apartment may be scripted as follows:

PR: We’ve just got a terrific script in from Vincent Ward. Sort of “River Queen meets Terminator”.

DG: You’ll need it with Peter Jackson breathing down your necks.

PR: You’re not wrong.

DG: Actually, it sounds like a Judge Lance file to me.

PR: Haa, really? Pass the marmalade Bruiser.