Hamilton Locke is an Australian law firm that, over seven years, grew from 12 people to nearly 500 and is now ranked among the country’s thirty largest firms.

Hamilton Locke is an Australian law firm that, over seven years, grew from 12 people to nearly 500 and is now ranked among the country’s thirty largest firms. When its Business Development Director describes how they operate, he says something worth noting:

“Here, they genuinely make use of the Business Development team. We have open and constructive conversations”.

Hamilton Locke built its model on a decision few firms have the courage to take: treating non-legal professionals as strategic assets. This is not a human resources policy, but a business decision with direct economic consequences.

Its founders, Nick Humphrey and Hal Lloyd, came from decades in major Australian and international firms and knew the pattern well: lawyers are the firm, and everyone else executes. Marketing, communications and BD teams exist to support fee-earners, not to influence how the firm is run or how client relationships are developed.

That hierarchy is rarely written down, but it is reproduced in every strategic meeting where non-legal professionals are not in the room.

They decided to do the exact opposite from day one. They offered equity participation to all employees, not only partners. They built a performance framework that measured and rewarded collaboration between lawyers and non-legal professionals.

Between 2023 and 2024, Hamilton Locke’s operating EBITDA grew by 203%

When they heard someone refer to “lawyers” and “non-lawyers” in a way that placed the latter in an inferior position, they corrected it, systematically. And they tied all of this directly to the firm’s economics.

Between 2023 and 2024, Hamilton Locke’s operating EBITDA grew by 203%. Several clients described their experience as collaborative rather than transactional, and noted that partners shared work among themselves with a level of ease they had not seen in other firms. That ease did not emerge spontaneously. It was the result of years of building an organisation where collaboration has real economic consequences and where non-collaboration has them too.

The question this case raises is uncomfortable in two directions. For firm leaders: if your Business Development, marketing or communications team is not generating genuine competitive advantage, is it a talent issue, or a question of how they are deployed and what authority they are truly given? For leaders of those teams: are you demanding the space you are entitled to, or settling for the space you are allocated?

In the Spanish legal market, we still tend to treat everything surrounding legal excellence as an unavoidable cost rather than a source of competitive advantage. Hamilton Locke has been demonstrating for seven years that this is a choice.

In your firm, are the people who know your clients best present in the conversations where decisions are made about how to serve them better?

Marc Gericó
Global Managing Partner at Gericó Associates