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Q&A: Will McCullough – “I’m lucky to be able to work on transactions that really put me at the front of Australia's developing technology trends.”
Welcome to our Q&A, Will. You grew up in the United Kingdom, but now run a thriving sole-practitioner law firm covering commercial, IP and technology law in Sydney. How did you end up in Australia?
I moved here permanently when I was about 27. Growing up, I was lucky to have lived in lots of different places as my dad was in the Army. So, after five years’ practising law in the UK, it was natural for me to start looking for somewhere overseas. In Australia, it is relatively easy to convert the UK qualifications to Australian qualifications, plus the lifestyle seemed really good and my brother and his family lived here in Queensland. I moved to New South Wales and the rest is history.
What convinced you to set up MCC Advisory and go it alone?
I started out as a corporate lawyer doing due diligence on transactions and a lot of the companies that we were looking into were IT and technology companies. As a result, I began to shift from being a corporate lawyer to a technology lawyer and started to develop a client base of my own. I found that a lot of those clients were very interested in speaking to me for my technology insights and it started to become more of a consultancy-type arrangement. That got me thinking – am I missing a trick here? Perhaps I don’t actually need the wider law firm model to allow me to practise law for the clients that need my help. After several years of thinking about it, I took the plunge and I haven't looked back.
We have to ask about your surname ‘McCullough’ and your time at McCullough Robertson. Is there any family connection to the firm?
Absolutely not. I’ve gone back to check and I’m pretty confident that there’s no nepotism at all involved there! But we did have a lot of fun with that when I worked there.
It seems that working in technology and IP law puts you at the heart of a growth area of law. Is that how you see it?
Definitely. Especially with the changes in privacy law and everyone becoming more aware of their rights around data. That is a growth area. Elsewhere, there is a big piece that I'm doing right now with GenAI components and it is just so interesting. I’m lucky to be able to work on transactions that really put me at the front of Australia's developing technology trends, which is great for me. It keeps me interested.
Clearly, you have a strong tech bent and knowledge. How, as a sole practitioner, do you ensure you are competitive with bigger firms that may have more resources than MCC Advisory?
The big firms will always have a really strong reach into larger organisations. One of the areas where I’m able to penetrate the market a little more selectively is by finding those small to medium-sized enterprises that need help. These are often owner-managed businesses, many of whom are tech-based and may have done their first few rounds of venture capital or private equity. That’s a really great place for me to come in and provide them with top-end-of-town legal advice, but at a price that remains accessible. Then, as they grow, they keep using my firm and the question never arises: ‘Who else should we be using?’; I've been in there from day one and I know their challenges. With some clients, I feel like I’m part of the furniture.
You have been a finalist in the Sole Practitioner category at the Australian Law Awards for a number of years now, which is a clear sign that you firm is performing well. What, though, have been some of the main battles or barriers along the way?
For me, it is around work-life balance, and also work-work balance. As a sole practitioner, there's no support team or staff around you, which means there’s no one at work to share the load with you. I have to find the work, do the work and run the practice – and that can create competing tensions. For instance, I like to feel as though I’m busy doing productive fee-earning work, but if I spend too much time doing that, I can lose track of client development and what's over the horizon. Then, if I snooze on my practice management, I suddenly have a huge amount of filing to do, or lots of bills to send out.
Juggling all those things is quite difficult and there are no colleagues to check in and see how you’re going. That’s one thing that I've struggled with over the years. The other thing is that there’s no colleagues to tell you that you’re looking frazzled, or that you need to take a break. As a sole practitioner, you have to be a little bit more self-aware, and a little more disciplined than you would be in terms of your own self-care and self-maintenance because no one's going to tell you when it's time to dial back a little bit. I have to be deliberate about getting off the tools at a sensible hour each day, trying not to work weekends, making sure the holidays are holidays, and ensuring that during family mealtimes the phone is away. These issues are probably shared with most legal practitioners, but I wonder if maybe it’s a little bit more acute as a sole practitioner.
Given your need to be efficient, have you found technology tools that can make a difference?
With any firm, it’s about winning work, doing work and managing the practice. That third pillar – practice-management – is the one that I have tried to minimise, automate and reduce in terms of my actual human hours. I use quite a high-end practice-management suite that automates a lot of my billing processes and matter management. It also sorts my email inbox into matter folders, which all means that I'm spending a lot less time doing admin. This means that the admin that I am doing is really quite focused and quite deliberate around ‘Where is my practice going?’, ‘What areas do I need to focus on more than I did last month?’, as opposed to ‘Do I need to get on top of my filing?’.
I also use software and tools to automatically populate a rolling task-list with deadlines and then I get reminders about those deadlines. It works really well, but it’s not cheap.
Do you feel comfortable sharing the brand name of that practice-management platform as we suspect our readers will be interested as part of their own market research?
I’ve used three platforms since setting up the firm five years ago, but the one that I’ve settled on at the moment is called Clio. It’s the best of the ones that I have tried so far.
Suffice to say that firms should really check out the practice-management market, see what works for them, and consider the pros and cons of using such a tool. Do you agree?
That’s right. I run a commercial practice, so my needs are specific to that use case. I know that people who are going down to court or filing court forms will be better served by different tools. For my business and my needs, though, it works really well.
This edition of ALMJ focuses on change management. How do you respond to the forces of change, stay agile and ensure that MCC Advisory is responsive to new trends?
When I set up the practice, the intention was always to be agile. I associate agility with a couple of things. One is in relation to being open to using my clients’ preferred ways of working. For instance, if I’ve got a client that has a workforce all over the world and they're using something like Slack to communicate with each other, then I'll hop into their Slack system so I can be visible and be present and communicate with them in the same way that they would communicate with their staff. It’s about being open to using new technologies in my practice to work with my client’s’ needs.
The other thing that I would say is that I set up this practice right before COVID-19 hit and, fortunately, I had always planned to run it as a fully virtual firm; I don't have offices where people can come in for meetings. During COVID, people started to do virtual meetings, which is what I was already doing every day. That kept me light on my feet during the pandemic when office overheads were a real killer, and I haven’t backed away from that approach. Actually, I've doubled down on making sure that I can use Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, etc. and that I can work in Microsoft Word, Google Docs and across all the other platforms. That, for me, is being agile because whatever way the client wants to work, I’m either already doing it or willing to make changes in my practice to accommodate them.
How else do you make sure that your client management is first class?
At McCullough Robertson, I worked with a senior partner called Alex Hutchens. I got to see his way of practising with clients, which is to be very approachable, authentic and sincere. I have tried to take that approach and build on it, which helps to demystify a lot of the hocus pocus about working with a lawyer; there can be a lot of barriers to approaching lawyers – Am I going to get hit with a huge bill? Am I going to get a hundred-page legal treatise, instead of a two-page answer?
A lot of what I do when I'm communicating with clients is explaining that they’ll get legal advice and legal documents that they can actually use, with no surprises, no bill shock at the end of the month, or anything like that.
You seem happy as a sole practitioner, but what is next? Do you want to grow the firm and bring on staff and extend the client base?
No, I’m really content to continue as a sole practitioner. There was a point probably about two years ago where there was a real feeling that, if I was going to take on staff, that would've been the time to do it. There was a huge amount of work on and available, and I could have easily slotted in one or two staff members to work with me. But I thought about all my objectives around setting up my own practice and it was about remaining autonomous and flexible and ensuring that I can provide clients with a consultant-type service. I decided to stay as a sole practitioner and it’s working really well.
Obviously, there are matters that come in that are simply too big for a sole practitioner, but then in those circumstances I work hand in hand with the larger law firms to assist. In those scenarios, I become the quasi in-house counsel for the client and assist with briefing the larger firm on the bigger matter. So, there are ways around it, but I think I work best as a sole practitioner at the moment and, until that changes, I'll keep it the same.