Darren Gardner Quoted in Lawyers Weekly
10/09/2007
The article "Financial ground zero" published in the September 22 issue of Lawyers Weekly, notes : ' In a way not seen since the dotcom boom, Australian lawyers are well and truly back on the US law firm radar, but will it last? . . . California-based Darren Gardner, an Australian who started Minter Ellison’s San Francisco practice in 2003, is now head of the international practice group at Seyfarth Shaw LLP. His focus is labour and employment, so his work is one area that is not so vulnerable to cyclical trends. He says there it is still very much a wait and see situation at the moment. “Everybody’s looking at it,” he says. “It’s a pretty sophisticated market and everybody is taking that into account, and I think lots of firms have learned their lessons over the last eight years, so it’s certainly at the front of people’s minds, but … there’s certainly no spectre of gloom hanging over – everyone is still very hard on the tools, and the outlook is still very positive.” . . . And some areas, although they don’t necessarily hire offshore lawyers in big numbers, just begin advising on different kinds of work. In Gardner’s practice area, for instance, he says they might just stop working on recruitment, and move to lay-offs when the economy heads back down. “When times are good you are helping people devise their hiring strategies, and when there is a downturn you are helping them figure out how to deal with terminations and managing the things that go along with that.”
