Having picked up an award last month at the NSW Export Awards, and preparing to head to the "nationals" this week as a finalist in the Australian Exporter of the Year awards - to be presented by the Prime Minister - Ridgway is keen to highlight the increasing importance of Pacific economies to our region.

Ridgway explains how his firm - which has six lawyers and himself as the sole partner - helps clients obtain legal services across English, French and US parts of the Pacific, including areas as diverse as the Cook Islands, Fiji, American Samoa, French Polynesia, Nauru, and Kiribati.

"Our firm offers the ability to provide a co-ordinated legal service to control and maintain the quality of the responses and make life easier for our key corporate clients," he says.

Ridgway adds that his firm is also the only international firm to offer direct legal services across such diverse parts of the Pacific.

While the GFC has indirectly impacted on these Pacific economies, Ridgway explains that the firm has managed to grow 30 per cent every year for the last five years - noting that this was a big factor in the firm winning the NSW award.

"It was because of our growth pattern, and also because we're not selling widgets to China; we're doing something different," he says.

"We're exporting our services to a part of the world which people would not ordinarily think about."

Ridgway recognised a need for such a service in the Pacific after finding himself in a legal role in Vanuatu in the early 1990s when he was hoping to find work in Asia.

"I didn't know where Vanuatu was, most people probably don't," he says.

Ridgway was later lured back to Australia to work for the then Blake Dawson Waldron, then moved on to Clayton Utz where he set up an office for the firm in Vanuatu - which he later bought out. By the late 1990s he returned to Sydney and joined Tresscox as a partner.

From Tresscox, Ridgway established the foundations of PLN through his referral service, providing a network of firms he had worked and dealt with in the Pacific. By 2002, the service was spun off into his own firm - originally with some assistance from PWC Legal - and later operating independently.

These days the firm predominantly undertakes corporate and banking work, with the client base almost entirely centred around multinationals such as ANZ, Westpac, and Digicel.

The firm can also boast some unique employment opportunities and experience for lawyers. Ridgway's last three associates have gone on to work for the UN and multinational banks.

Not surprisingly, the firm is a competitive and popular source of employment for young lawyers. "We usually like people who have done something different with their lives - people who have travelled a lot, are sensitive to other cultures, people who are prepared to back themselves as well," he says. "It's a bit like a mini UN."

And Ridgway has a warning for any future lawyers who might join the firm. "There is a lot of travel," he says. "We work in places where young lawyers are quite happy to travel into the Pacific islands and stay in three-star hotels and work under a coconut tree. I did that for a number of years and I'm now grateful that I've got other people to do that for me."