A little over two months ago Federal Attorney-General launched a strategy document for the International Legal Services Advisory Council (ILSAC).

In his speech, he said that Australia's cross-border legal services activity had grown by more than 24 per cent - to $675 million - in the last two years.

He said that Asia as a market for legal services had grown twice as fast as the rest of the world since 2004-05.

All of that was very interesting to us because, just a few days before the Attorney-General made that speech, we announced our plans to join international legal practice Norton Rose Group on 1 January 2010.

In the course of putting together our merger we identified a number of international investment flows which are important for our firms and for Australia. They include between: India, Singapore and Perth; Tokyo, Singapore and Jakarta; Sydney, Singapore and Shanghai; and China, Perth, Sydney and Brisbane.

The reason for all of this increased cross-border activity is, of course, because business investment flows - as is the case with the internet - no longer respect historical boundaries.

That ILSAC document I referred to earlier also looked at options for exporting Australian legal services, from the fly-in-fly-out model and hub-and-spoke, through to strategic alliances. We've been having similar discussions internally for some time.

One of the key reasons for our upcoming merger is a desire on behalf of Deacons Australia and Norton Rose to provide clients, particularly in Asia, with access to seamless, borderless legal services.

Australian organisations are increasingly global in their outlook. Our response to this needs to be global too. We concluded that to realise our ambitions for clients, the best strategy was to join an international group and operate as one firm - which is what we will be doing.

Deacons Australia and Norton Rose believe there will be a limited number of truly international clients and that number will dictate just how many true international legal firms there will be by the year 2020. Naturally, we want to be one of those firms.

Don Boyd is chief executive partner at Deacons Australia