Jack Porus: the business of running a law firm

for the “real” world. He was offered part-time work in the tax department of accounting firm Barr Burgess and Stewart and sought advice from his Uncle Bob.

“Uncle Bob”, who was married to Porus’ mother’s sister, happened to be Bob Narev, a commercial stalwart at law firm Glaister Ennor. Narev had a much better idea: the accounting job was a good position, he told Porus, “but we’d rather hoped you’d come and join us here”.

Another holocaust survivor, Narev had been a father figure to Porus, who was only 12 when his father died. He was tempted by the Glaister Ennor role, but it was fulltime and he still had several years’ study ahead. And law school dean Jack Northey was known to disapprove of students working parttime while at university.

But Northey, to his surprise, gave him the green light. “Because it was Glaister Ennor, he said I’d better take it,” Porus says.

A fulltime job alongside fulltime study was very full-on, Porus says. But 50 years later, he is still at Glaister Ennor. And not just at the same firm but in exactly the same Norfolk House offices on Auckland’s High St, deep inside what was once the heart of Auckland’s legal community.

Part of his decision to join the firm was its reputation. “It was busy, but I got through it and realised when I came here what a privilege it was because [firm founder] Stuart Ennor was very highly regarded as a litigator and Bob Narev was very highly regarded as a commercial lawyer.

Jenni McManus

Jack Porus never particularly wanted to be a lawyer. And his mother, of Lithuanian Jewish stock, would have preferred him to be a doctor.

But Porus, the former managing partner at Glaister Ennor and one of the country’s top property lawyers, instead had a hankering for business. So, he turned down a place at Auckland medical school, telling his mother he was enrolling for a commerce degree.

But Mrs Porus, a holocaust survivor who emigrated to New Zealand in 1949, was a strong woman. “She said ‘if you’re not going to be a doctor, at least be a lawyer’, Porus says. “So, the compromise was that I did both.”

But after two years at university, Porus was still hankering

Also in the line-up were Peter Woodhouse (the son of former Court of Appeal President and ACC architect, Sir Owen Woodhouse) and Paul Davison (the son of former Chief Justice Sir Ron Davison). “So clearly if those very prominent jurists felt that this was the place for their sons to be, then I couldn’t go too far wrong.”

The businessman

Because he was so interested in business, Porus immediately took an interest in the way the firm was managed. And one of the first things he noticed on his arrival in 1972 was the complete lack of electronic equipment in the office (though he eventually found a dictaphone buried at the back of a cupboard). Secretaries took oral dictation and the firm’s

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Continued from page 06 accounting was done with adding machines and big, bound books. Fax machines (now all-but-obsolete) were yet to be invented.

Porus says his colleagues recognised his interest in the business of the law. By his mid-20s, he’d made partner and was appointed managing partner not long after that. His contemporaries, however, didn’t enjoy such a meteoric rise. “I was a bit of a rarity,” he says. “Because I worked fulltime and studied fulltime, by the time I graduated I already had an enormous amount of experience. So, I actually realised my dream. I ran a business. It just happened to be a legal business.

It was a fortuitous appointment. Soon after, Porus found himself enmeshed in a profession that was about to undergo a major restructure. Lawyers until the late 1970s-early 1980s tended to be groups of professionals working together, almost as co-operatives. Much of their work focused on conveyancing, supported by a scale of minimum fees. But when this scale was abolished, lawyers were forced to compete in a more businesslike way.

Porus says the conveyancing scale had been a major support for the financial stability of legal practices and once it was scrapped, the immaturity of the marketplace became clear.

“You saw lawyers under-cutting each other in an effort to grab business and you got ‘kitchen-table lawyers’ who were working out of their homes,” he says. Inner-city practices suffered as clients became reluctant to come into town when lawyers were setting themselves up in the suburbs. “It was quite a challenging period for legal practices.”

Many lawyers struggled, leading to the mergers of law firms from the mid-1980s. Some businesses ceased to exist, but Glaister Ennor resisted the temptation to merge and turned down invitations from several players. “It turned out to be the right strategy because a lot of the mergers didn’t succeed,” Porus says. “We just concentrated on continuing to drive our practice forward.”

The firm decided to compete on expertise rather than price. “So instead of focusing on everyday conveyancing, we moved into land development which required greater expertise and there wasn’t the same pressure on fees.” It also began to develop expertise in areas like trusts and estates, commercial property, family law and litigation and put great store on developing and preserving relationships with clients.

“Many of the firms became very transactional,” Porus says, focusing on speed and efficiency rather than building long-term relationships. “We adopted the philosophy that the transaction may end but the relationship continues. So, we were very much a relationship-based practice and we’ve continued in that way to the present day.

“It translates into all sorts of things – for example, we never argue about fees. If a client is unhappy with a transaction or the level of fees you charge, just resolve it and move on because the relationship is more important than that transaction.”

Narvev, Porus says, put it well: ‘We are a firm with a large number of clients rather than a number of large clients.’ “We did later get a number of large clients, but the basis of this firm is looking after a large number of clients who are everyday people…. the grassroots of it all was just us looking after families and their needs.”

Porus was also instrumental in setting up Glaister Ennor’s mortgage securitisation practice. Common in the 1990s, these initially involved contributory mortgage lending, using a law firm’s nominee company. The firm would amalgamate funds from clients who wanted to invest and lend it to others to buy

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