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Opinion: Why Asian markets are not necessarily the best option

This article is pretty vacuous. For one thing, in talking about the possible ways of tackling Asia it refers to two firms' Australian ventures - one a merger (Deacons and Norton Rose) and the other the poaching of a substantial team from an Australian firm (Allen & Overy and Clayton Utz). Asia and Australia are very different markets and discussions of the two should not be conflated. Vastly different considerations apply when considering how the two markets should be approached. The "problem" with the Australian legal market is probably less that it's small than that it is highly competitive. Australia has a surplus of lawyers and this drives down the incomes that lawyers, even top lawyers, can earn here. (A side effect of this and the quality of legal education in Australia is that Australia exports substantial numbers of lawyers to the UK, US and Asia.) Given Australia's surplus of lawyers, any firm looking to set up here has to work out how it is going to make it pay. An enhanced ability to recruit lawyers for Asia might be one advantage of an Australian office, but many UK firms have had no difficulty in recruiting Australian lawyers without incurring the cost of an Australian office.

24-Mar-2010

5:33 am