Minter Ellison has been described as “enigmatic” by some competitors, but it might just be the case of those competitors not being able to see the wood for the trees. “We are such a large, broadly spread organisation operating in so many markets and submarkets that you simply can’t look at us and assume that something that is the case in the Sydney market would be the same in the Gold Coast market or the Wellington market,” said CEP John Weber.  “We are prominent in jurisdictions where other people aren’t.”

Minters and Clayton Utz both had solid growth last year, while many competitors stagnated. Weber attributes the growth to a strong counter-cyclical practice.

“We act for a number of clients whose businesses actually got busier during the downturn:  government agencies who became heavily involved in either asset sales or work related to government programmes being delivered to try and avert the financial downturn. We have maintained a tier-one insolvency and restructuring capability which for many years wasn’t a very sexy thing to have, but come the downturn people were run off their feet.”

Speaking of unsexy areas of law, Minters is one of the few national firms to retain an insurance practice, focussed on matters such as high-end professional indemnity work. “Of course, that work doesn’t tend to dry up during the downturn,” Weber said.

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