A child of working-class Spanish migrants, Juan Martinez has risen to the top of one of Australia’s largest partnerships. HWL Ebsworth’s managing partner says the challenges he faced in his youth have given him the hunger to succeed and shaped his leadership style. He speaks to Miro Sandev about growing up in Melbourne’s west, the unique culture at HWL and his relentless drive to expand the firm.

Juan Martinez is as open in his mannerisms and tone as he is with his early childhood memories of the difficulties faced by first generation migrants. Born in Madrid, Spain, he came to Australia with his parents in the 1960s, at the age of three, and remembers vividly the financial hardship of those early years.

“The simple reason we migrated was poverty. I could dress it up but that’s what it was for my family,” he says. “The situation in Spain under Franco was really bad and my parents’ view was that neither they nor us, their kids, had a future there.”

He credits his espousal of meritocracy and fairness in the workplace to his family’s rejection of a business culture dominated by nepotism, connections and mutual back-scratching.

“It was very much the case that whether you achieved anything, social mobility and so on, depended on who connected you. So if you had a good connection or someone to help you, who held a higher status, then you went further. But if that did not happen then you stayed in your position. My dad was a bricklayer, working construction, and I would probably have done the same in that environment.”

Martinez speaks of his parents’ tortuous separation from their homeland but adds that they were ultimately grateful for the migration program that would eventually open up new opportunities for their children. Initially, however, there was some shifting around to be endured before the family finally settled in the suburb of Broadmeadows in western Melbourne.

“When [my parents] came out, they didn’t have anything – no networks, no money, nothing. We started off in Darwin in a migration centre and were then shipped down to Melbourne. My dad started working odd jobs. We ended up living for about two years in Broadmeadows at Camp Road, which was an army barracks converted into a migrant hostel.

“Later we rented in Ascot Vale for a while and then moved into a housing commission place. For my parents it was great, but I drive through there now and I look at it and think ‘Jesus, how did we ever live here’? But for them it was a great improvement from where they had come from, so they were grateful.” 

For the teenage Martinez, a carefree childhood was short-lived as his family’s circumstances called for him to step up and take a leadership role assisting his parents with the administrative duties of running a household. But he is quick to say that he does not begrudge this at all, appreciating its character-forming value. 

“My parents couldn’t speak any English, so what happens is that you end up having to do a lot of the adult work very young – so you go out and fill out forms and read stuff. You learn a lot of things as a child that in normal circumstances you wouldn’t. I think it is actually a good thing and it impacts a lot on the style and leadership principles that I bring to the firm. It helps you form judgements, to read the traffic so to speak.”

Like many children whose parents migrate in order to escape economic stagnation, the young Juan was inculcated with a burning desire and hunger to improve his lot, succeed professionally and make his family prosper in their adopted homeland. He chose to study law because he saw it as a way of pursuing those dreams. “So it wasn’t a case of sitting in a comfortable environment and doing a selection process, thinking ‘oh that would be interesting wouldn’t it’? It was more about necessity and imperatives for me,” he says.

After graduating, Martinez completed his articles at a South Yarra boutique commercial law firm, which he admits was quite a change to the rest of his life experience. He spent four years there, eventually becoming an associate, and credits the stint with instilling in him the rigour required for life in the corporate law world. Eventually the desire to develop professionally took over and he decided to make the move into the city, joining HWL.

Taking charge

Martinez was made partner and in 1998 rose to the managing partner role. He believes the struggles he faced in his youth, which taught him to make difficult decisions quickly, prepared him well for the challenges facing the partnership he was now to lead.

“The office at that stage was only 40 people and six partners. It was struggling as a firm, it didn't really know what its vision was and financially it wasn’t doing as well as it should have been. So there were some parallels between my personal struggle and entering into a partnership that had struggles embedded in it too.”

He believes that the success of the business lies in the unique set of values it espouses, which have parallels to his own life, with importance placed on honesty, transparency and good value. Martinez is well aware that there aren’t very many managing partners with his type of early-life experience and thinks that lack of diversity at the top has a lot to do with the mindset at the recruitment stage.

“The mindset and criteria for selecting people who are meritorious in many sectors of the legal profession, particularly in private practice, are very pigeon-holed. [It’s about] if you went to the right school, if you had the right contacts, if you have an honours degree; so you tick all these boxes and then you have an answer. I’ve got a different set of boxes.

“You still look at those other ones because they are relevant matters, but we have a host of considerations about where people have come from, what’s their life experience, what have they had to deal with in life to prepare them?”

He believes lawyers who meet these criteria will be well equipped to empathise with clients who often have their own stories of disadvantage and seek out that common ground from their advocates. He credits this recruitment approach with attracting the like-minded partners and associates who have been joining the firm in droves recently.

Aggressive expansion

Since 1998, staff numbers have ballooned to nearly 700, including what Martinez says is the eighth-largest partnership nationally, with 143 partners. The numbers reveal the extent of the aggressive expansion HWL is now driving, including the opening of a Canberra branch last year after it snatched up a platoon of partners from DLA Piper. 

“What became immediately evident in the first meeting with [those] key people, and then was vindicated in subsequent meetings with the rest of the partners…was cultural fit, an alignment to our business model and our similar values. People need to believe the story so that they can continue with it. It has been terrific; because that cultural fit ended up being right and the practice leaders go about their business with a very light touch from me.”

Senior lawyers like Dennis Pearce, Gary Rumble and Angela Summersby have all since joined the office as it awaits likely appointments on the Federal Government’s multi-user list in coming months. When law firms experience this kind of rapid growth in a short space of time there is the danger that resources will be thinned out across the group, but Martinez says HWL maintains the importance of client access to its partners at the core of what it does. For him that is the focus of the value proposition – getting the national footprint and high-calibre talent that a top-tier service provides, as well as the partner contact and level of attention boutiques offer.

He is confident this business model will continue garnering successes on the eastern seaboard, as well as in Canberra, and is even starting to look closer at the possibility of launching an office in Western Australia.

“It is an interesting market; it has become a little bit more interesting with the dollar going down a little, the financial markets overseas tightening and the commodity prices going down. Perversely, I think that those sorts of dynamics actually open up an opportunity because when a market is very heated it is not very attractive to go into because there is difficulty around the cost of entry. Everyone is doing well and it is a sort of boom time.”

His characteristically fresh perspective may well end up playing an important role in the dynamics of the WA legal sector. With the Canberra office now settled in, Martinez says there is breathing space to start looking seriously at pushing westward.

“A firm like ours, with a national footprint, going into a situation where a bit more caution is starting to creep in, you go into that market with a strong, compelling value proposition which is different; that might be interesting. The reality is that we had been flat out on our other offices but I think that it is, for those reasons I mentioned, interesting now and it may suit us looking at it as a possibility.”