Mark Pistilli’s plan to build Australia’s next top-tier law firm started beside a swimming pool in Las Vegas.

That poolside conversation led him to Gadens, where he’s been CEO and Managing Partner since 2020, overseeing the firm’s rapid growth as partner numbers increased by 60% to more than 120 partners across six Australian cities.

We sat down with Mark to talk about the strategy behind Gadens’ growth, why the firm has said no to entire practice areas, and how it plans to compete with the likes of Corrs and G+T.

My journey at Gadens started by the side of a swimming pool in Las Vegas. I was there with some friends for a celebration, including a friend from university who is a partner at Gadens and on the board. He said, “Gadens is effectively a joint venture of three firms, we don’t think it’s the greatest structure. We need someone to help us merge those firms and attract some leading laterals. The only person I know who’s done anything like that before is you. Would you be happy to come on board and help?”

I said, “absolutely not.” I didn’t know anything about Gadens and I wasn’t prepared to move from where I was. But he wore me down over the course of the week. I ended up saying that if I can get the buy-in from the board, and be satisfied that the partners are of the right calibre and culture, then count me in. Either it’ll work or it won’t, but if they’re up for it, we’ll have a crack.

Back in 2016 or 2017, Gadens was a joint venture of five independent firms — Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Dentons came along and offered to make the firms “Dentons in Australia.” Three of them said yes — Perth, Adelaide and Sydney. Brisbane and Melbourne didn’t join.

Melbourne and Brisbane then had to recreate the Gadens network from scratch. Melbourne established a new Sydney office. Everything you see in the Sydney office now — about 200 people and more than 30 partners — was zero people in 2016-17. Brisbane established a new Adelaide office, and we associated with Lavan in Perth. If that doesn’t sound like a good structure, it’s because it wasn’t. Too often, the first discussion with clients was about explaining who we were, rather than learning about their business and how we could help them.

Gadens wanted to merge those firms together and grow their Sydney offering. When I met the board, they all had genuine appetite for that change. But change like that is really turbulent — it can affect financial returns, people who have been at the firm a long time and long-standing client relationships. It’s a really difficult thing to do psychologically. I’m a bit of a risk-taker, but not everyone around us was. I wanted to make sure they were genuinely up for it as it wasn’t a risk-free proposition. It’s easy in hindsight to say, “of course you should have done it”, now that we’re acting for market-leading clients. But at the time, it was a hard decision. It was clear Gadens were ambitious and needed someone in place to help lead that change.

The vision is to be widely regarded as a leading independent Australian law firm. It sounds simple, but there are a few elements to it.

Let’s start with “Law firm”. Many firms are moving into adjacent consulting services, and we increasingly compete with tech and multi-disciplinary firms. One of the ways we distinguish ourselves from those firms is by being unapologetically focused on legal services. 

“Independent Australian” is also key. We want to be known as a firm that has Australian people, business, policymakers and government right at the centre of everything we do — a focus that’s shifted for some other firms as they’ve grown beyond the Australian market.

And then there’s “widely regarded” — for Gadens to be recognised as a leading Australian independent law firm. It hasn’t been the case across our 180-year history, but we’re on the cusp of that, if not already there.

In my mind, it started when I was a partner at Chang Pistilli & Simmons, a corporate boutique firm. That firm merged with Clifford Chance as the market was globalising, around 2010-2011. That globalisation left the market without enough tier-one independent Australian firms. Then we saw the rise of G+T and Corrs as they moved into that vacated space. A lot of the big, serious tier-one players disappeared and became the Australian arms of global firms. That planted the seed in my mind.

When I came to Gadens, I thought this was a great opportunity for an ambitious firm to tie itself together and create Australia’s next national first-tier firm. I’d seen the rise of Corrs and G+T, and I thought that there was scope for another firm to do it. Why couldn’t it be us? That’s why the firm was happy to engage a change agent like me.

In firms like Gadens, you’ll find very talented lawyers who would succeed at any tier-one Australian or global firm. They’re as good as those lawyers and work just as hard. There was a great foundation here. You just needed the ambition and to unshackle yourself from a conservative past and try something different.

We got out of family law pretty early. It has a different profile — clients generally don’t have a positive experience as a family law client and that can impact the rest of the firm. In my experience, you don’t find family law practices in large corporate firms. We also moved away from acting for mums and dads — residential lending, conveyancing, wills and estates.

So, we act less for individuals and we choose not to act on matters where the public perception wouldn’t fit a firm of high calibre.

We always look at Corrs and G+T as our key competitors — the top of this new breed of Australian law firms. Our culture is very different to theirs, but we like a lot about how they’ve grown into that space. When I first moved to Sydney in the late nineties, G+T was a TMT firm with no corporate, no finance, no litigation capability. Fast forward to today, and it’s arguably one of the best law firms in the country.

We also have to acknowledge that Mallesons is back in this race too. Their decision to move back into where we’re playing was really clever. It vindicates our strategy, but it also adds another competitor.

In terms of how we distinguish ourselves, it’s our engagement with the international market. We say we’re fiercely independent, but Australia sits in a broad global economy and we have to work out how to interact with that. We’ll never tie up with a foreign law firm or network — instead, we’ve built close relationships with firms from key jurisdictions across the globe who refer work to us. We put our referral firms into gold, silver and bronze categories, so we can pick the right horse for the matter.

In the last 12 months, over 10% of our partners have been on planes. At any given time, we try to have someone somewhere in the world showcasing the Gadens brand because we historically haven’t been well-known internationally. We’ve visited almost 20 countries, targeting the markets where capital is likely to flow into Australia.

The rates we charge are premium rates for the Australian market. 

The global firms are looking for global returns and are looking to charge rates closer to New York and London to sustain those returns. That’s a mismatch with what the local market wants. 

Look at where our partners have come from — Clifford Chance, Ashurst, Jones Day, Mallesons. They’re tier-one-pedigree partners. Lawyers are type A personalities, so they’ll do the work at a tier-one level, not down to a price.

So, I wouldn’t say we’re cheap. We provide better value because you’re getting an equivalent quality lawyer at a lower charge-out rate when compared to the global firms.

Both. You can’t have lateral growth without promoting internally. Otherwise, your lawyers will form the view that the only way to become partner is to move sideways. So, we have a heavy emphasis on internal partner development. But if you’re growing beyond what your internal pipeline allows, you will have a disproportionate number of laterals, which is where we’ve been. That period of heavy lateral recruitment will start to steady out as we move into an environment that’s more about succession.

We’re at over 120 partners now. If you look at the ideal size for an Australian law firm, you probably want to sit between 120 and 160 partners. We’re starting to see Australian firms with close to 300 partners, which is a historical high. The challenge is that they have too many partners to go to market without creating uncontrolled conflicts. My sense is that they’ve outgrown the market.

That’s a key issue.

Culture is the most important thing — it solves so many problems. Culture needs to be strong enough to be national, but flexible enough to allow for local identity. When we recruit, we’re very clear that people need to be of a particular mindset. We don’t tolerate bad-behaving individuals, even if they’re high-performing. If someone doesn’t fit the Gadens culture, that’s totally fine. If they like an eat-what-you-kill model or want to compete with people internally, they won’t work well in Gadens. We pass on people quickly if they don’t suit our culture. It’s not ‘cult-y’; we don’t want to create a cult. But we make sure people are in the right spot.

We’re also like a sponge. If someone turns up from another firm and has thoughts on how we could do something better, we’ll adopt that. We’re not tied to any particular way of doing things. 

Yes, we’re staying independent. The market is very well-serviced at the global level. There are many Australian firms that are now part of really good global firms. But for our clients and our people, they’ve bought into the importance of the Australian market, the deals happening here and the people playing in this market. We also have great international connections we’d isolate ourselves from if we became part of a global firm.

Our strategy is robust enough to weather the current turbulence in the market.

We spend a lot of time tracking where Australia’s GDP is coming from — the ASX top 200, where foreign capital is looking to land, global trends in capital flow. Then we build our business around that. If you look at where we’ve grown recently, it’s in M&A, FSR, defence, health and life sciences, energy and resources. We’ll keep following those pockets, because we think they can be best serviced by independent national firms.

The big unknown is still AI — how the firm gets impacted by tech change, automation and the kind of work people are going to trust to lawyers going forward. I think our strategy can withstand it. What could genuinely force a pivot is something like a regulatory change, or clients being better served by legal services bundled with adjacent offerings. Short of that, it’s hard to see a tectonic shift that would require a different posture — that would mean the law firm model itself had broken down.

Subject to that, I don’t see our vision or strategy changing very much.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.