This post contains a list of law firms in Australia that I will continue to update. Hopefully it serves as a helpful list of firms to work through when you are applying for clerkships or graduate roles.
Top Tier Firms / Big Law
Big 3
- Allens
- Herbert Smith Freehills
- King & Wood Mallesons
Rest of the Big 6
- Ashurst
- Clayton Utz
- MinterEllison
Upper Mid Tiers
- Corrs Chambers Westgarth
- Gilbert + Tobin
Mid Tiers
International Firms
- Allen & Overy
- Baker McKenzie
- Bird & Bird
- Clifford Chance
- Clyde & Co
- Dentons
- DLA Piper
- Hogan Lovells
- Holman Fenwick Willan
- Jones Day
- K&L Gates
- Norton Rose Fulbright
- Pinsent Masons
- Squire Patton Boggs
- Seyfarth Shaw
- Sidley & Austin
- Sullivan & Cromwell
- White & Case
Australian Firms
- Gadens
- Hall & Wilcox
- Hopgood Ganim
- HWL Ebsworth
- Jackson McDonald
- Johnson Winter Slattery
- Lavan
- Mills Oakley
- Tottle Partners
- Williams + Hughes
- Wotton + Kearney
Disclaimer
I have ranked the firms according to the generally accepted tiers of Australian law. As you can probably tell, I have not ranked the firms inside these categories. I acknowledge that ranking firms is a somewhat redundant process. Particular firms have strengths in particular areas. For example, Gilbert + Tobin are renowned for their high calibre on corporate work and compete (and sometimes beat) the quality of work produced by the big three. However, these tiers are generally reflective of the scale and quality of work coming out of the respective firms in each category.
If you want further specific information on a certain law firm’s capabilities in an area of law, take a look at one of the following commonly referred to industry rankings:
- Chambers’ Asia-Pacific Guide – I recommend limiting your search’s ‘location’ to Australia and ‘practice area’ to whatever area of law you are interest in.
- Doyle’s Guide – search the rankings according to area of law and/or location to narrow the leading law firms and practitioners in each segmentation.
Other ways to get an idea of the hierarchy of the Australian legal landscape are:
- staying up-to-date with Australian deals – an easy way to do this is reading business news publications such as the AFR or monitoring prominent law firm’s article publications found on their websites (the firm’s like to brag).
- staying up-to-date with prominent litigations – this can be done by trawling online court systems (hard mode), or more accessible, reading Australian legal publications such as Lawyers Weekly.
- talking to others in the profession – lawyers love the status game. Just ask them to start talking about their recent deals or matters and you’ll be begging you didn’t. But equally, you’ll find out a fair bit about the size of their matters, the types of matters they often work on and the complexity of their work.
- talk to law students – just as much as lawyers love gossiping, law students probably do even more. Law schools are a central focus point of law firm gossip. Get a vibe for each firm by talking to other law students. Not only will they be able to talk on personal experience (especially students from older years who have done clerkships), but other students will likely have connection to industry to speak with some authority (or maybe not, take it all with a grain of salt and DYOR).
What did I miss?
This list is continually a work in progress. In the future, I intend to:
- seperate the list according to different Australian cities; and
- convert the list to a table with further information and the ability to be filtered.
In the mean time, comment below any firms I missed and I will add them to the list!
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