Today, we’ve got an amazing guest, a real privilege to have and one of Matthew’s mentors, Dennis Liner, here with us.

And we’re at the Law Institute of Victoria. First of all, I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land that we’re in today and pay my respects to the Elders past, present and future.

Dennis has got a fantastic story.

Dennis started a firm called Tisher Liner FC Law.

How and When did you start?

I set myself up the day after I got admitted. I was setting myself up in Gardenvale, which was a little-known suburb near Brighton VIC. I just called it Dennis Liner, and after about two years, I found that I couldn’t handle all the work and all the variety of work. And I was in I was introduced to Frank Tisher, he was in a similar position. So we got together and handled some work. I handled some work too so we splited and swaped files, and it worked quite well. And we’re pretty busy, and we got another partner, Alan Goldstone and we’ve been merging. Now I think the firm got about 60, over 60 people working in it. But I retired from the firm about three years ago to concentrate on my mediation work, you know, doing mediation, do a bit of coaching, mentoring bits and pieces.  

Matthew: When you look at it, you can go back for a moment, because I think the story of you joining with Frank Tisher and then creating your partnership for many years and growing a such a successful firm. I think that’s a great story. Many partnerships fail. But you all seem to have succeeded.

What are some of the key points that go into creating a successful partnership?

Dennis: Look, I think it’s often just personalities. Partnerships fall apart, often because of personalities. Sometimes somebody does not work hard enough. That’s often a problem. Luckily, we’re both pretty easy going. Lifestyle was a very important part for both of us. I suppose we could have made more money over the years, but, we both were family orientated and, whenever my children at school had something to do, I’d take time off and go and see them. Frank would also do the same. School holidays would take off and spend it with the family. And when I came in, we continued and said lifestyle is very important at the expense of getting more money. It’s that’s not everything. It’s a matter of having a good balance of work and life. And I think we got it.

And, you know, so I’m pretty happy with how it went back in those early days when you found the right partner, somebody that had the same interests, the same attitudes to work and money.

Matthew: You then started developing and scaling your firm. How did you go about setting up all those processes and systems and things like that to make sure everything was done?

That just trial and error. I’ve always enjoyed technology, and I’ve always had the technology. So the accounting and all late precedents have all been of ways, latest technology. We spent probably too much in the early days. Technology moved on, you know, first-hand where we started. You didn’t have calculators, didn’t have computers. Definitely not computers and I think we had the cloud before we even heard of the cloud. We didn’t call it the cloud. It was really just using finding somebody that had offsite servers, and they looked after our requirements. Today people say, you know, we put things on the cloud — same thing. But never, never existed in that terminology those days. So we’ve had that for years.

“Marketing is a big thing. It’s. And word of mouth. I mean, you keep existing clients happy. They refer you. And that’s the best source of work.”