Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

Alison Deitz, who takes over as Australia managing partner of global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright on Wednesday, wants to make diversity a hallmark of her tenure by bringing in lawyers from overseas offices, changing graduate hiring processes and examining the makeup of its partnership.

"I'm very driven to make sure that our partnership looks and feels and is diverse, not just in terms of gender but also diversity of thought," Deitz said in an interview. "We certainly want to look at the mix of our partners. It means less 'John Smiths' at the firm."

Deitz, a banking regulation partner at Norton Rose since 1998, was elected late last year to succeed long-term managing partner Wayne Spanner and to sit on the firm's global executive committee.

Alison Deitz/courtesy photo

Since then, the firm has been in a handover period, but Deitz's transition to the new role has been disrupted by the COVID-19 crisis.

In fact, in late February she was riding in a taxi to the airport to fly to a global partners meeting in the U.S. when she received a call to tell her the meeting had been canceled.

"Rather than attending the global partners conference, here we were trying to deal with the pandemic, which really hit at that exact time," she said. "So it was an interesting baptism of fire, let's just say."

Even so, Deitz is already looking ahead and planning to leave a more diverse firm as her legacy.

She agrees that much of the profession is still dominated by lawyers of European ancestry, but said it is changing.

"Just as gender has washed through the profession, it's better now than it was. It's not where it needs to be. I think what you need to do is have a conscious focus on change," she said.

"And for us as a global firm, that may mean bringing people in from our other offices. That is one way of doing it. It may mean in our selection process for our grads and our lawyers, making sure we've got that lens on," she said.

She said the firm's mix of lawyers should replicate the jurisdictions in which it operates.

Globally, the firm has set a 40:40:20 gender diversity target, which requires 40% of partners to be female, 40% male and 20% "flexibility to be truly inclusive," she said.

In Australia, the firm has 133 partners and 546 other fee-earners. Some 32% of its partners and 69% of its senior associates are female.

Separately, the firm has several Indigenous law students who intern with the firm, which holds a minority-interest joint venture in Indigenous-owned law firm Jaramer Legal. It also has a Pride network to create an inclusive culture for LGBTIQ+ identifying staff.

"As a leader, I'm happy to be challenged," Deitz said. "We don't want to have people who are 'yes' people. We don't want to have replicas of ourselves."

It's about more than fairness—it's also about providing better solutions to clients, Deitz said.

"If you don't have that diversity of thought, you are not going to be able to provide holistic solutions to client problems," she said.

This played out during the height of the COVID-19 crisis, when clients sought advice on "real-world" problems, such as finding global solutions to a broken-down supply chain. "It's not just legal solutions; it's practical solutions," she said.

While the coronavirus crisis might have hit clients' businesses, it hasn't had much impact on Norton Rose Fulbright's billings from the current financial year, which ends June 31, Deitz said. She expects the firm will see an increase in its revenue over the previous year.

Transactional work in recent months has been down, she noted, but other areas, such as restructuring deals, have increased.

Even so, Deitz said the uncertain environment will continue for some time and she questioned what will happen to the Australian economy when government wage subsidies aimed at keeping companies afloat and people employed run out.

The market for legal services is "not necessarily" growing in Australia, she said, and Norton Rose Fulbright will use its global reach to service clients where other firms can't.

"What we see now is a great opportunity as firms are retreating because they're not able to travel and they don't have that network," she said. "We certainly can service our clients."

Other firms also claim to be international, but Norton Rose Fulbright has very strong North American and African practices, she said.

Meanwhile, the firm is pushing its government practice and it's restructuring and insolvency practice in Australia, areas that will continue to be busy. Clients are also seeking advice on some newer areas of legal practice, such as risk advisory, financial crime and cybersecurity.

In those areas, "clients are just hungry to understand what we can deliver to them and what we can offer and how we can help them through their problems," Deitz said.