By John Butler
I was admitted to practise in the Supreme Court of New South Wales in November 1972 after working full-time in the law, and studying part-time, for six years.
In 1974, I left the Department of the Attorney General & Justice in Sydney and took up employment in private practice in Queanbeyan New South Wales, on the border of the Australian Capital Territory. I was admitted in the ACT in 1975.
In 1975, I was the only employed lawyer in a small sole principal practice. My employer had been a schoolteacher before he undertook law as a mature age student. He had an open mind and was very progressive. He had travelled to the USA and had visited legal practices there. He had embraced the latest in technology and the practice incorporated IBM mag card typewriters, a Lanier complete office dictation system, and an Olivetti electronic accounting machine. My long-time interest in technology was fuelled by my experience in this practice.
Shortly after joining the practice in 1974, my employer had sent me to a one-week residential workshop at the University of New England, on the Management of a Legal Practice. I still apply and benefit from much of what I learned during that week.
My employer was a very capable non-litigation property lawyer. My responsibility was to deal with all litigation in the practice, which ranged from minor criminal work in the Magistrates Court to a claim against the Commonwealth in the Supreme Court of the ACT on behalf of the plaintiffs whose freehold land in the ACT had been resumed.
In the three years I worked in that practice, I had interesting and varied experience. When the Family Law Act came into operation early in 1976, I became increasingly involved in family law as I took on the agency work for firms in Goulburn, Cooma and Bega. We commenced all proceedings in the Family Court in Canberra, and I appeared regularly in that court on behalf of my own clients, and the clients of the firms which briefed me.
In 1977, I was offered a partnership in the firm, together with another senior litigation lawyer who was a friend of my employer. He had left the federal Attorney General’s Department to join us in private practice. My wife and I decided we did not want to spend the rest of our lives in Canberra and, when I saw a position advertised in Perth, I applied for the job with Muir Williams Nicholson & Co, an old and highly regarded Western Australian firm.
I was successful in obtaining the position and, late in 1977, we packed and drove across the Nullarbor to take up my new employment in Perth. I was to work directly for the senior partner in the firm, who practised extensively in family law. When I arrived, my employer had already left to go on three months long service leave and I sat in his office and looked after his clients in his absence.
I discovered shortly after my arrival that trials had been listed in a number of matters over the next three months. When I asked the senior partner’s secretary who we briefed as counsel, she said, “You.” I took a deep breath and gulped as I realised I was expected to appear as counsel in all matters. This came as a huge shock to a young lawyer from New South Wales, where your client would be prejudiced if you did not brief counsel from the independent Bar to appear at trial. So, there I was, sweat rolling down my back, as I realised what was required of me.
My first three months in Perth were quite traumatic. It included a trial where the other party was represented by senior counsel from the Melbourne Bar, and my client was a terrible witness. It was sink or swim! Somehow, I managed to survive this period and was relieved when I did not lose my employment on the return of the senior partner.
I very soon learned that my boss was a larger-than-life character, who had earned a reputation for speaking his mind and terrifying younger practitioners.
Some months after my boss returned from his long service leave, I was told the story of what had occurred with my predecessor on an occasion when he was due to appear as counsel at an interim hearing. When he returned from the interim hearing, his boss handed to him the file copy of a letter which his boss had sent to the lawyer on the other side of the matter. In the letter, his boss had advised that, so confident was my predecessor of winning the argument, he would “stand bare-arsed in the Murray Street window of the Boans department store at lunchtime on Friday if he didn’t win”. Fortunately for him, and despite not knowing what was riding on the outcome, my predecessor had won the argument.
The late 1970s and early 1980s were exciting times for me working in the law in Perth. The partners in the firm included some of the best legal minds in the state, and many of them went on to become judges or to hold other eminent positions, including the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Western Australia, judges in the Supreme Court and the Federal Court, and the Solicitor-General for WA. I was able to draw on their experience and to learn a huge amount from them.
On one occasion, I was appearing as junior counsel with David Malcolm QC, in a seven-day trial in the Family Court. On the morning of day three, David told me he needed to appear in another court that afternoon, and that he expected me to continue with the trial as counsel in his absence. I was terrified, but survived.
On another occasion, we inherited a client after his first trial in the Family Court had settled after several days. I appeared as counsel at the second trial, which was a disaster and settled after four days. I then appeared as counsel in the third trial, which ran for 11 days. At the end of the third trial, we obtained orders that his three sons be returned to their father’s care.
Not only did I find myself gaining quite incredible litigation experience, I had some very unique clients. One of those clients, after we had resolved his family law issues, took over more than half of my time acting on his behalf in his many other matters, and dealing with his other advisors, both in Australia and overseas. This resulted in me travelling to Europe on his behalf each year between 1980 and 1984.
I was also able to indulge my interest in technology as the firm embraced the latest in technology.
During the early 1980s, our firm formed a joint venture firm with Freehill Hollingdale & Page, and then merged with FHP. The result was that I was the only family law partner in the national firm.
The senior partner of Muir Williams, who had employed me, and had been my mentor, retired as a partner and became a consultant. Shortly afterwards, early in 1987, I decided to retire from the firm, and to buy my area of the practice from the firm. I am very grateful to the then managing partner for his assistance in facilitating an arrangement which enabled me to take all of my clients, and the staff who worked with me, together with the retired senior partner as a consultant to my new firm. I commenced my new firm on 1 July 1987.
I will always be grateful to both Freehills, and Muir Williams, for the quality of the work and the experience which I gained, and for the tremendous legal skills and knowledge of my partners.
One of the major changes in the law over the last 40 or 50 years has been a much saner and more mature approach to work/life balance by most young lawyers. In the early 1980s, as a partner in a national firm, I worked at home each morning from 4.30am to 6.30am before having breakfast with my wife and children and then going to the office. I made sure I was home for dinner with my wife and children before going to the study at 8.00pm and working until midnight, from Monday to Friday each week. I did have the sense to attend all school activities for my children and to spend most of the weekends in family activities. As this was before our current technology, I took home from the office each afternoon two Gladstone bags of files and a dictaphone. What a crazy life!
I am aware of the dangers of relying on memory, which can be most unreliable. However, while we worked very hard, my memory is that professional relationships were generally more relaxed, and we were more willing to make time to socialise with our colleagues. The Law Society held a major Summer School in January each year, which incorporated both updates in the law and a strong social program.
Becoming an employer in my own right was one of the greatest immediate changes following the establishment of my own firm. I was fortunate to be able to start my firm with a number of very experienced and capable staff who had worked with me at Freehills.
The firm grew rapidly and, at the end of the first year, my long-time friend in the law, Stephen Crooks, joined me in partnership. The firm went from strength to strength, and we were able to do some amazing things such as taking all of our team to Singapore for staff training.
One of the benefits of a smaller firm was that we were able to get to know each other better, and to work more effectively together, than is often the case in a national firm.
My new firm acquired its first fax machine in 1988, and we were one of the first small firms to do so. Before emails, we were able to “bombard” each other with faxes. I also acquired my first mobile phone in 1988. It was a “brick”, and only a phone. It had none of the functions of our current mobile phones.
By the late 1980s, our children felt they did not really need us very much and my wife and I began attending business programs in Australia and overseas. We both agreed we wanted to create a very different environment in a legal firm and I decided to leave the firm, which I had established in 1987, to create a completely different environment in a new firm.
I had always been enthusiastic about technology, in part because my brother was very knowledgeable in this area. He was a schoolteacher who embraced computers when they first arrived. He went back to university and completed a masters degree in technology. He ultimately wound up living in Seattle and working for Microsoft in the area of education and technology. In 1993, he told me to buy myself a laptop computer and to use it every day.
On 31 December 1993, I left my then firm. On 1 January 1994, my wife and I opened our new legal firm. One of the immediate differences was that we required every employee to purchase their own laptop computer, to our specifications, and we paid them a monthly technology allowance to cover the cost of that computer. Where they couldn’t afford to purchase the computer, we had an arrangement with our bank that it would fund the purchase because the monthly allowance more than covered the repayments on the loan for the computer.
I can still remember the first time I was able to type and send emails while travelling by car from Geraldton, where we had an office, to Perth.
Similarly, I can still remember the first time I typed emails on an aeroplane on the way from Perth to Sydney and then sent them once we had landed. Technology has certainly been one of the biggest changes in the law in the last 30 years. With AI, this is only going to escalate.
In 1993, my then firm opened its first country office in Busselton. I assumed that clients from Bunbury would be happy to see me in Busselton, which was significantly closer than our Nedlands office. However, I soon learned that a Bunbury client would rather spend over two hours driving to Perth to see me in Nedlands than drive for about half an hour to Busselton. Over the period from 1993 to 1999, we opened offices in Busselton, Bunbury, Albany and Geraldton. At one stage, we even had a Mandurah office and a Margaret River office. What on earth was I thinking?
I enjoyed my country clients. They were often distinctly different to my city clients. I acted for lots of farming families in their business succession planning and found my knowledge of family law issues very useful in this area.
By 1999, we had closed all of our country offices, except Bunbury, which I have continued to visit at least once a month. The difficulties of finding lawyers to work in our country offices, the challenges of supervising those lawyers, the time involved in visiting those offices, and the cost of operating those offices had all become too much. We still have a significant practice in Bunbury, on the basis that the work is done in Perth and the clients are seen in Bunbury, except when otherwise necessary.
The years rolled by and I planned for my ultimate semi-retirement in rural New South Wales. I realised I could offer our team a bigger and brighter future if we merged with a larger firm. I believed that the firm with which we would be best aligned, and with which we could most successfully merge, was HopgoodGanim. This is a large Brisbane-based firm which was established in August 1974. Paul Hopgood, one of the founding partners, and I have been friends for over 40 years. From what I knew of HG, I believed a merger would offer significant benefits to both firms, and the last year has confirmed my belief.
My role has changed completely with the merger and I’m now able to offer my services as a Notary Public, to continue to act as an executor of those estates where I have been appointed, to act as a trustee for a number of trusts, and to act as a director of a number of companies owned by long-term clients of mine, in my previous firms.
The last 50 years in the law has offered me the opportunity to work in a small country firm, to be a partner in an old Western Australian firm, to be a partner in a national firm, to work in a small- to medium-sized suburban firm, and to practise extensively in the country, as well as in the city. In many ways, my current role as a consultant has proved to be the least stressful and most rewarding period of the last 50 years.
My sincere thanks to all of my clients, my legal colleagues, and the loyal team members I’ve been fortunate enough to work with during those 50 years. I’m especially grateful to John Lawley for first stepping up to become the managing partner in Butlers, and then to lead our team within HG. Despite all the challenges of practising law, I could not have wished for a more satisfying and fulfilling career.
