How many nuclear scientists does it take to run a law firm? Bill Fazio is in a better position than most to answer that particular question – his first degree was in nuclear physic and mathematics. “I have a pretty wide skills set – I’m the sort of person who takes cars to bits and I originally wanted to be an engineer,” Fazio recalls. A school careers counsellor steered the young Fazio away from that particular path and he found himself opting for maths and science.
It was the first step in an eclectic career path which has included a stint as an investment banker at Bankers Trust and long periods of service with the firms now known as Blake Dawson and Minter Ellison. It has been a circuitous path to Fazio’s current role at Herbert Geer and he has few regrets. In particular, he values the time spent on the other side of the proverbial lawyer-client fence: “I’ve been a client on a significant matter, I’m able to put myself in the client’s shoes,” he says. “A law firm can be a bit of a cocoon – it’s the real world, but not the whole real world. I’ve experienced the frustrations of using lawyers and the cost of using lawyers and it’s good to have experienced it rather than just theorising about it.”
Herbert Geer has been one of the movers and shakers of the east coast legal profession – the firm was named the second fastest growing law firm in Australasia in last year’s ALB Fast 10 survey and many felt that it was unlucky to miss out on the top place, which ALB controversially awarded to listed aggregate firm Integrated Legal Holdings. The firm’s most recent milestone was the two year anniversary of a merger with Brisbane firm Nicol Robinson Halletts – a move which Fazio says took some time to bed down. “It took about twelve months for people to genuinely and spontaneously see themselves as part of Herbert Geer rather than NRH with a different name – that’s something everyone had to work at,” he says.
The hardest part of the transformation, says Fazio, was the wholesale change taking place on a continuous basis across premises, teams, IT, branding and strategy. “While exciting, the constant change has required a careful focus on maintaining a clarity of purpose of all the constituent elements of the transformation. All our planning was around what we were expecting to be, not what we currently were,” he says.
Fazio describes Herbert Geer as “reasonably full service” in Sydney and Brisbane but says that there is still work to do in building up breadth and depth and a choice of partners to accommodate personal client preferences. “There is a point of critical mass of market awareness where the market knows you because the market keeps bumping into you. We have that in Melbourne, but we don’t have that depth of innate market awareness in Brisbane and Sydney just yet,” he says.
Expansion into other states is not being ruled out, but Fazio says the key priority is to finish the job in Sydney and Brisbane. “Now is not the best time to add to the “to do” list. If someone in, say, Perth came to us or a client wanted us there, we’d be interested. But it’s not a high priority - it’s on the list there somewhere,” he says.
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