From one ambitious firm to another, former KWM Australian head Tony O'Malley talks to Legal Week about his jump to PwC and the firm's plans for Asian growth

More than a decade after they wound up their legal services arms and the accountants are back with a vengeance. Asia in particular represents one of the biggest propositions for the firms as their international client bases continue to pour investment into the region.

Most ambitious has been PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which announced in April its intention to boost its Asian revenues from $75m (£48m) to between $150m (£95m) and $200m (£127m) over the next five years and to double the number of lawyers working in the region. In August, it hired ex-King & Wood Mallesons management duo Tony O'Malley and Tim Blue to spearhead the expansion, tasking them – alongside the existing legal head in Australia and Asia Andrew Wheeler – with growing the PwC legal brand across some of the most diverse and highly regulated legal markets in the world.

Three months in, the trio report feeling "a buzz" in the market; their days and weeks filled up with interviews, bringing clients and talking strategy.

"It has been an easy sell for clients because most of those clients have an existing relationship with PwC," says O'Malley. "It's also energising being part of something that's growing rather than something that's 'shrinking to greatness' as they call it, or 'innovating through equity management'."

The initial focus is to get Australia right, he says, and grow the corporate advisory practice from seven to 20-25 partners. The ultimate aim is to have strong teams in four core areas of corporate advisory, regulatory, projects and finance, and employment and immigration in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, with Sydney being the biggest. As it stands, the legal offering includes 32 partners and 150 lawyers across the country, most of whom are tax lawyers.

"We need to be as good as anyone else in the market in those areas," O'Malley explains. "Corporate advisory [especially] fits with the global strategy, which is to be strong in areas that are complementary to the firm's broader core competencies in tax, deals and consulting."

The focus on corporate work has evidently touched a nerve with some private practice lawyers, fearing the loss of mid-tier M&A work. O'Malley clarifies that PwC will be working across the board from private client to major corporate, but doubts whether this will have significant market impact.

"We're going to be a relatively small group in market terms – we're not trying to stand in the market with some of the bigger firms and say 'hey, we're full service'. We're just focusing on servicing clients of PwC where there are natural adjacencies. Sometimes that will be mid-market and sometimes that will be ASX top 50…. [But] there's plenty of room in the market for all of us."

That said, new hires will no doubt come from the top 10 Australian firms; the firm already having recruited KWM senior associate Natalie Kurdian and Allens partner Tim Frost.

As for broader Asian growth, O'Malley says it's still early days. The most recent launches include Japan and Singapore with one and two partners respectively; the aim being to build these out, as well as the existing practice in Vietnam, using the same footprint as in Australia. A China launch is likely to be next, but O'Malley keeps his cards close to his chest.

"[After Australia, our second priority] would be Singapore – from an Australian perspective that's where there is a lot of inbound and outbound activity with regional clients. And then we'd be looking to work with the territory heads in Vietnam and China and the other jurisdictions on their build."

In all areas there is a need to practice local law, Wheeler stresses, given the cross-border nature of client transactions, which creates some limitations in markets where foreign firms are tightly regulated. He clarifies that where possible, the aim is to have one PwC partnership comprising accounting and legal services, as is the case in Australia, but in some markets due to local restrictions there may be the need for PwC accounting to work in association with, or side by side, a separate legal partnership.

The type of work will depend on the dealflow in the particular geography, but inbound investment is an obvious starting point," O'Malley says.

"With a lot of PwC practices in Asian jurisdictions it's initially about capturing the inbound investment work, but over time as they get more embedded in that market it's about picking up some of the high-end local work, and to the extent that you've got those relationships, outbound work.

Certainly O'Malley seems cut out for the challenge, having previously worked in senior management positions in-house and in private practice. That said, surely it must be a big change moving from the number one firm in Australia, based in Sydney, to a big four accountancy firm with its eyes on regional domination?

"There are pros and cons," he responds. "On the positives – the infrastructure is in place at PwC. They're in all the regional markets. And I don't mean toe in the water, I mean they're deeply invested in all of the regional markets, they've got deep local relationships and so to the extent we want to align our regional growth plans, it becomes incremental, it isn't start up.

"And you've got each of the territories empowered and motivated to drive stronger growth, because that's part of the culture here. So there's local buy in to what we're doing."

On the flip side, the verein structure means management needs to implement plans for growth through influence rather than command and control, he says, working carefully with the regional territory leads to demonstrate that a particular approach is the right one.

Looking ahead, the aim for PwC in Asia goes beyond just setting up legal camps in various jurisdictions, to building a solid legal offering. "Legal has been more of a support function," he says. "Our challenge is to be of a sufficient scale and quality to create waves for the rest of the business.

"That's what success would look like and we're seeing some early signs of that now. What we'd like to do is get the deal flow to a level where over time we're seen as an equal within the business."