“There’s a common misconception that there’s a correlation between team size and excellent service and results and that a well-known firm name will somehow achieve a quality result. In our experience, that’s not necessarily so. Every matter that we get in, we treat it as the most important matter in-house and throw everything at it. And if you think about this for a moment, even if you are dealing with a traditional large firm, often the team dealing with any particular matter will be a sort of similar firm size to our own,” he explained.

“Like the big firms, when we need to conduct a large-scale document review – we recently conducted a review of some 300,000-plus documents – we scale up often in the same way that a big firm does by hiring in contract paralegals or what the US attorneys call contract lawyers.”

In terms of hiring contract staff, there are a number of options available to firms, including the hiring of contract paralegals from both companies and universities – which is something Blackwattle Legal does on occasion.

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“There’s an emerging market of lawyers who hold or have previously held practising certificates. They’ve taken time out for the profession for one reason or the other. Perhaps they don’t actually want to come into the office full-time or to have a full-time permanent job, and they’re willing to take on jobs like document review on an ad hoc basis,” Mr Withane added.

“And those can be fantastic resources because we’ve actually able to tap in, one’s able to tap into someone who’s got a vast amount of practical experience as well as the legal qualification.”

In order to maintain relationships with these contracting individuals and entities, Mr Withane said regular communication is key.

“We try to maintain good regular contact with our suppliers, tell them what we’re up to, what we’re seeing in the market, find out how they’re going with their own businesses, and how we can help them. And that creates for us a stock of goodwill,” he explained.

“A client remarked to us not long ago that we always seem to have access to the best barristers, and we would agree. The reason I think we have access to the best barristers is similar to the point I made about other service providers. It is making sure that we’ve developed very good relationships with counsel so that they favour our work.

“The bar is a small place. Good barristers, excellent barristers are in hot demand. They’re very difficult to get, and sometimes, we need to get them on urgent matters, such as if we’re having to obtain an urgent freezing order or a similar such application, and so we develop those relationships. Some of them, we try to knock down the boundaries so that they become friends.”

In addition to barristers and contract staff, there are also a number of other stakeholders Blackwattle Legal need to build and maintain relationships with.

“Within our team, we’ve got people who are excellent at researching the law and can find nuanced points of law and just absolutely love doing that. That’s not everyone. We’ve got someone else on the team who’s brilliant at process. So, when we get a large complex matter, that’s the person who can organise the process, do things like Gantt charts and so forth that make the management of complex, document-heavy work manageable and within our competency. And we’ve got other people, for example, who are great at communicating with the clients and other stakeholders.

“I can’t really emphasise how important the in-house team is and making sure that there is cohesion within the team, there’s diversity within the team. It covers a full range of skill sets and actually, probably very importantly, in my view, that colleagues are happy,” Mr Withane said.

“Turning to accountants and such providers, I mean they are very, very important particularly in our line of work where dispute resolution, litigation lawyers and insolvency lawyers, and both of those types of law often require engagement with service providers such as an accountant who might provide a valuation report or a forensic report in a fraud-related matter or a solvency report in a[n] insolvency matter. And similar to the point about barristers, ensuring that there’s engagement with those types of service providers throughout the year helps them to be onsite. It makes the working relationship easier. And then when we are in the heat of the moment, actually working with them and understanding their working styles can be very, very helpful.”

Mr Withane has meetings and regular coffee catch-ups with some of these service providers, in addition to offering training and other support.

“For many of the accountants, for example, we’ll offer training to them on topics that are relevant to them. Now that’s both helpful for their education, getting their CPEs or CPDs or CLEs, whatever they term those training sessions,” he added.

“But it also gives us an opportunity to showcase our expertise and intellectual calibre such that we’ve found that many of these accountants have then started to refer work to us, so that’s a sort of a multipurpose approach.”

In addition, Blackwattle Legal has a varied team with a wide range of skill sets and personalities.

“When I started Blackwattle Legal, it was just me and one other, so that was fairly easy to achieve, but we set our values before the firm was incorporated. It’s always had a value that centres around the person and that starts at home, as it were. And so I’ve built a team with this in mind from the get-go,” Mr Withane concluded.  

“What’s the hardest thing I’ve found? Well, it’s actually working out where people’s strengths are so that we know that the next hire is a complementary one and we’re not just doubling up on, we’re not just creating a room full of Trevors, for example. That would be a terrible thing.”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Trevor Withane, click below: