00:00 Introduction

paul alistair groundbreaking moment first time we’ve ever had anyone on the show wear a suit and we’ve got two of you at the same time very exciting very exciting moment for us i feel like we’ve grown up as a show today because we’ve got adults on it um welcome um so both of you are corporate and commercial lawyers for deutsche miller and you have a particular interest in the space that we work in as in startups

and scale-ups and accelerated growth businesses and we’ll talk a little bit about that but i think we’ll just kick straight into it because everyone wants to know why i’ve got two people wearing suits on the show so let’s just find out right now so paul let’s start with you tell us a little bit about deutsche miller and and what it is that you guys do so we are a premium boutique law firm we’re based in martin place we focus on two main areas the first is alistair my area which is corporate commercial work

so we do work from raising money employee share options schemes as companies grow through to fund bigger fundraisings

01:15 What Deutsch Miller does: corporate law from cradle to exit

buying and selling of different companies so anything really from cradle to exit um and people to exit i like i’ve not heard that before i like that there’s a difference in the cradle to grave bit yeah the graveyard yeah yeah i think it’s better well though it could be anyway carry on so uh and the other side of the business is uh litigation so we’re a five partner firm uh we’re the two corporate commercial partners and the other side of the firm is litigation that there’s a whole range of

of different type of things but we won’t talk about that today as we’re focusing on on our area on our area certainly and just to add it’s not only you know it it’s enabling the scale ups to go all the way through and the exits can be sale or it could be ipo that alice has got a particular experience in okay so before we get into sort of that you’re

02:00 Paul’s story: leaving the UK to start a boutique firm

one of the founding partners so you were there right at the beginning so just tell us just briefly what sort of inspired you to start a firm i believe you’re a equity partner in a number of very high profile successful firms both here and in the uk what made you leave that lucrative world of high-end legal firms to start your own your own firm tell me well i moved from the uk 14 years ago where i was a partner in uh

for london i’ve been amid market practice about a 70 partner firm i moved here into a premium boutique firm and a few partners there saw a gap in the market for a boutique offering where there’s a lot of owner managed businesses entrepreneurs high net worth investors you know mid even even mid-level listed companies that weren’t comfortable at big firms now i would certainly never come on here and insult any other firm

but sometimes there are different type of clients that are more comfortable different environments absolutely so so we felt that um we could give more more personal contact more personal service um in a more cost-effective environment with no sacrifice to experience our expertise so the three wins we saw it the three wins i like it and alistair you’ve been there for coming up i think about three years somewhere around there right now so um

what brought you into this firm well um

03:20 Alistair’s path to Deutsch Miller

like paul i originate from the uk uh i’ve been here uh 17 years now he’s on my trial period competition um so i yeah i started off over here uh at a large firm uh and then i moved into a medium-sized firm uh whereas a partner there and um things uh didn’t turn out as well as uh one would have expected um and i think

i’ve known paul um certainly ever since he’d moved over here and we’ve had mutual friends three years less than you obviously three years later yes he’s fresh off the boat um and uh you know we’d always talked about working together at some point in the future and when i was looking around at firms um i’ve always liked the premium boutique model yep um for the reasons that that um you know paul’s already uh explained um

it’s very um partner-led work we get very involved with the clients um you know there are different models of firms as you say and they all provide different different things where my sort of clients are and where um i think most of the work that the firm does in a boutique environment is very connected with the clients and they’re not necessarily institutional clients they’re much more owner-managed businesses and small

businesses that are scaling up quickly yeah okay so um it was always an attractive proposition for me to go um and work with paul i think if it hadn’t worked out that way i think probably paul would have ended up moving into whatever firm i was in at some point so i think it was inevitable we were going to work together destiny destiny that we’re going to work together this magical moment here i don’t even know if i can feel it

05:15 The original partnership that did not work out

the first iteration of partners didn’t work out and that’s not pointing fingers on on anyone sometimes you don’t get on or you don’t have the same vision you can relate to that very um and a lot of people can relate to that and it’s and it’s a real lesson

you know when we went in you know everyone thinks that they know everything at the time but to be on the same page as a people you work with the other founders of a business is is so important and if there’s any niggle in your mind what i take to anyone think about going to business with anyone else if there’s any doubt in your mind or if you feel you’re not quite on the same page really talk about that really explore that because it is painful everyone thinks i can handle it yep but you can’t

07:30 How co-founder pain helps them relate to startup founders

do you think that’s really sort of helped you relate to a lot of the the smaller startups and scale-ups that you’re dealing with do you think that you find that a lot easier to understand and help them through that process because you’ve literally been through it yourself look we we took a risk both of us but but i went into a new set up a firm two and a half years into this country which in hindsight was far too early

so i think a lot of clients see lawyers as people who who don’t take a similar risk and and i think i can empathize more than most laws of having you know i’ve probably got a bit more of an entrepreneurial spirit than the average lawyer but i’ve taken that risk i’ve gone through those sleepless nights

08:58 What makes Deutsch Miller’s culture different

what i was looking for when i when i wanted to move um two or three years ago was people yeah our business is a relationship business um and when both of us moved over here we came knowing no one yep right so all our relationships are back in the uk so you come here knowing no one you got to basically start again and it’s all about building up those relationships

as paul says when you’re in a firm particularly when it’s a small firm those relationships between the partners are absolutely critical if that doesn’t work the whole business will fail and we’ve all been in places where that’s happened yep and you’ve seen how easily it happens and the stress that it produces on you know everyone that’s involved

13:00 Services for startups: fundraising, ESOP, M&A and IPO

i started building relationships probably eight nine years ago in the technology space so i did start to work with a lot of fast-growing companies doing a lot of seed fundraising rounds and then moving on to series a fundraising round and a lot of employee incentivization schemes and then seeing the companies grow quickly it’s very rewarding as that advisor entrepreneur relationship

what we can give clients comfort with is that that we can grow with them and when they’re coming to their more complicated transactions whether they’re looking to take more senior fundraising whether it’s from an international vc or pe firm or whether it’s to exit which might be their most important transaction of their lives that they’re comfortable that their advisor has been with them is still the right advisor

17:30 Private lending, finance and ASX listings

i’ve probably done a little bit more on the finance space um so private lenders high net worth individuals can be family offices that have recently got into the lending space and also on the borrower side as well for the companies

since debt’s become obviously much more palatable so i’ve probably done a little bit more of that sort of work and then also ipos so when some of these obviously recently there’s been a lot of tech companies that are trying to list on the asx

19:30 The real cost and timeline of an IPO

it’s a proper six to twelve month process the actual process itself is probably only three months but to prepare for it to get the company in the right state it’s probably a good another three or six months

i think they’re shocked when they hear about the professional fees that are involved in listing not ours but the brokers and the accountants

21:00 Being guided through two business exits

part of our job is is to educate people the process you know why hasn’t someone responded with a certain a period of time to explain that it’s very normal um i think one of my partners says you’re only allowed to get worried if i’m worried yeah about the process and i’m not worried

it gets very stressful especially you know if you’ve built up your baby over a number of years and you’re sending it to someone else you’re worried about the staff you’re worried about risk you’re worried about whether you’re making the right decision

23:20 Why owner-managed businesses need a different kind of lawyer

those institutions are the people who are making decisions there it’s not their money yep it’s a very different mentality from an owner-managed business or a small founder who’s just started up a business when it’s their money it’s their baby they’ve built it up they’ve got much more concern

for the lawyers you have to have that mentality that you can align yourself with those owner managers rather than acting for an institution where it’s much more about relationships and about understanding the clients and making the decisions with them and holding their hands through the process

26:40 The emotional roller coaster of M&A deals

it’s the m a deals where it’s more of a roller coaster if you’re selling a business there’s always that moment where something happens that you try and foresee anything and everything and something comes out of nowhere might be a resignation of an employee it might be an ip issue that no one’s thought about

i’ve been doing this for almost 30 years in that time the number of deals that have actually aborted whilst we’ve been involved in them is well i can count them on one hand less than five once you get down to that level where the lawyers are involved it’s quite rare for deals to fail

30:00 Paul’s belief: good culture beats command-and-control

i would talk about culture because as you grow up through different law firms often the culture is not good and people think to have a successful law firm you’ve got to have a nasty tough control a very directive competitive culture putting everyone’s competitive timesheets each week

i fundamentally believe a good collaborative collegiate culture leads to a win for everyone and i’m including the partners in their profits i’m including the employees and their way of enjoying their day their learning their growth i’m talking about the clients from getting the better results

33:00 Alistair’s belief: losing faith in partnerships and rebuilding it

i was at a firm before deutsche miller for 13 years and culture was a big part of that firm and loved it i loved it there that’s why i was there for so long and i was amazed that things could go wrong so spectacularly and so quickly

moving and going back into that environment has kind of given me that sort of belief back again in people because the real shock is that i had assumed obviously mistakenly that all people all lawyers or senior lawyers professionals were you know normal

36:00 Why choose Deutsch Miller as your legal partner

there are a lot of lawyers that can technically do the job that you probably need for the fundraising or the particular transaction you have in front of you what i would say that i’ve probably seen more fundraisings than most lawyers over the last seven or eight years

it’s not only that deal it’s looking for the future it’s picking your partner to be able to go through the next many stages of your journey you don’t want to pick one lawyer for a seed fundraising round and go somewhere else for an employee share options scheme

38:30 Why junior lawyers should join a boutique firm

the breadth of work that we do in the corporate and commercial space from commercial contracts through to fundraisings through to m a work finance ipos we cover cradle to exit it’s a pretty broad range of work so there’s a lot of variety

we’ve also got the infrastructure and support that you’d get in a bigger firm but in a smaller firm environment where you’re going to get much more client contact even as a junior lawyer

41:00 Future-proofing your career

if you want to build up your own practice even as a one-year qualified lawyer and you haven’t started yet that’s fine but go somewhere where you can start to do that otherwise you end up being just another lawyer that is very good technically doing your job and that only takes you down certain avenues

gentlemen thank you very much it’s been a pleasure and it’s been much more fun than everyone expected both wearing suits the whole set was a little worried but it seems to have worked out okay