Mackay Chapman – five years young

Five years ago in July, I left the partnership of Mills and started Mackay Chapman.  I finished at Mills on a Friday and on the following Tuesday (the prescribed notice to the LSB expired on the Monday night) Mackay Chapman started.  

It was called Mackay Lawyers & Advisors, a hasty decision made with my wife Lou, on maternity leave, and helping me set up a law firm from our kitchen bench.  She was setting up email addresses and needed a web domain, and therefore a name.  

Mackay Lawyers it was.

I started on my own (with help from Lou) and one client.  A week later Lou gave birth to a baby girl. So we had an 18 month old who didn’t sleep and a newborn, and a newborn firm.  Some advice given to me at our local café, Wall 280 (where I held client meetings in the first few months) was apt – there’s never a perfect time to do anything, starting a business is no different.

A week or so later I had another six clients.  We still didn’t have a website, and I couldn’t get the printer to ‘scan to email’.

A friend let me squat in the front room of a rental in St Kilda East she used for ‘home chambers’.  

I was in that front room in mid August when I learnt that my father – instrumental in my decision to leave the Mills partnership and go my own way – had taken a turn in his battle with cancer.  I jumped in the car and  drove to Box Hill where he was in hospital, not sure if this was it.  It wasn’t then, but it wasn’t long.  He died in October.

Shortly after his funeral, more clients came.  I was referred into an ASIC investigation and commenced acting for clients that Mackay Chapman would still be acting for in 2021.

Suddenly, I had too much work.  I needed staff.  I reached out to a law student who had done a clerkship with us at Mills, he put me in touch with his mate, and within a few days I’d employed Charles Haszler, Chas, then still a law student.  There was no contract.  Just a coffee ended with a handshake and a few key details Chas wrote on a post it note.  

At the same time we moved out of the squat in St Kilda East and into our first office in Bank Place.  Chas’ first day was in the new office.  I realised too late that I hadn’t told him not to wear a suit, and Chas ended up constructing his own office furniture (Ikea flatpack) with me in his best interview suit, sweating it up but not complaining.

Soon after we hired Amy, another law student.  More clients came, and we settled into Bank Place, grappling with the aftermath of my Dad’s death but buoyed by the support in doing so from key clients, and friends at the bar, not to mention Chas and Amy.

Soon Amy got a grad role and was moved on.  She was replaced by Shakti, another law student, a friend of Chas’.  Because of a typically inflexible big law approach to graduates without permanent residence, she was working with us instead of an ‘international’.

Not long after, Yu-chiao Hsueh joined me.  We’d worked together a few firms back and Fred and I were working together again .  We got too big for our office and moved to a new suite, still in Bank House.  Hattie joined us as Practice Manager and set about cleaning up the ‘financial’ back end of the firm, and sorting out the lawyers.

Chas became our first graduate, another law student James joined us, and a bit later Shakti got an associateship at the County Court and didn’t look back. .

The worst thing about leaving Mills had been leaving my team.  I missed them as friends and colleagues, and the chemistry we had working together on big, complex, ‘on-the-precipice’ disputes.

In 2018 one of the biggest things in the firm’s short history happened.  Michael Chapman, my former teammate from Mills, decided to break away too.  He asked me to be his referee on a job at another firm.  I asked him if he was sure he was ready to leave Mills.  He told me yes.  So I agreed to be his referee if he agreed to consider the offer I was about to make him.  Next thing he was joining us.

Together, we hatched our plan for what we wanted the firm to be, how we wanted to work, and work to live, and how we wanted to do legal work better.

Around a year later in mid 2019, with the firm about to turn three, I looked at where we were at.  It wasn’t where I had expected it to be.  We were busy, we had a heap of clients, but we weren’t quite what or where we wanted.

We engaged Simon Quirk who I’d worked with at Mills and Clarendon, to assist with our strategy and how we could get to where we wanted to be.  At the same time  I reached out to Michael Bromley, legal marketing consultant extraordinaire, on Linkedin after stumbling across a piece of content he curated during a morning commute.  It was fortuitous.

We reset, working out a plan and a strategy, defining what we wanted ourselves and the firm to be.  We started producing structured content, speaking to this.  We also looked at what we offered, and went back to our strengths, our expertise.  We stripped back the firm’s services to focus on regulatory investigations and actions; complex disputes; financial services and credit, and insolvency.

Then in early 2020 COVID-19 hit.  Just a week before Dan Parr had joined us.  He hardly got a chance to start in the office.  With the first lockdown looking imminent, Michael and I decided to close the office.  We picked up our micro desktops, monitors and peripherals, a desk chair and a few other things, and jumped in an Uber each.  A few hours later we were already online, business as usual.

COVID put some of our plans on hold, as we dealt with surges in work, the struggles of lockdown (and the extremes of loneliness and boredom away from work for some of the team, homeschooling for me), getting through it, and helping our clients do likewise.  Not once during 2020 lockdowns did I feel anyone in our team was taking the piss.  In fact the opposite, I had to speak to Dan Parr and Chas about working too hard and the need to take time out.   It was a year of getting through, but there were also a number of incremental steps.  Keagan joined us for a six month contract and hit the ground running.  Michael and Sian had Everleigh, and Michael entered the world of the sleep deprived.  The firm made some hard calls about some clients and types of work.  And once the 2020 lockdowns were lifted we dusted off the strategic plan.

Keagan finished up and was replaced by Anthony Jensen, a senior reg and financial services lawyer I’d worked with at ASIC many years ago.  AJ was coming back from seven years in Dubai, via hotel quarantine in Sydney.  His first day was working in hotel quarantine – in his words, ‘what else am I going to be doing?’. Our invaluable IT consultant David Bower couriered AJ’s IT setup to the hotel in Sydney so all AJ had to do was plug it in.

In March 2021 we became Mackay Chapman as Michael joined me as a director.  Incremental steps were in the past.

On July 12 the firm turned five.  This was just six days after the birth of Lou and my third, baby Jack.  It brought a synchronicity with the start of the firm five years earlier.  Again, we had a newborn and relatively newly re-born firm.

There’s more around the corner too.  We will shortly announce new team members, and another major development later in the year.

Why am I writing this only now?  Because a newborn, a growing firm, and a lockdown keeps you busy.  

But the five year birthday needs marking, even if it’s a couple of months late.  

The other reason I am writing this is to say thank you to many of you who went out of your way to support me, the team and the firm.  It would have been nice to have got all of you in a room with a drink to say thanks, but turns out that wasn’t to be this year – at least not yet.  Next year perhaps.  

For now, you know who you are.  Thanks.

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