Another Slater & Gordon Departure Heightens Crisis
Slater & Gordon earns its bleeding stars this month with the departure of a third Chief People Officer to have resigned in just over a year, as employee morale crashes harder than their trust in management.
The firm has turned what should be a simple HR transition into a full-blown horror show, as the Australian Financial Review has reported and as we reported here.
Facts That Stuff The Narrative
- Slater & Gordon, once a proud Aussie consumer law monolith, now owned by private equity overlord Allegro Funds since April 2023. One of the largest consumer law firms in Australia and one of the first firms to go public, Slater & Gordon have entered a hellish PR crisis with the recent unfolding debacle.
- What: Another CPO walks. Third in just over twelve months. Employee satisfaction? Plummeting faster than reasonable pay raises. The Australian Financial Review
- Why: Because “workplace dysfunction” has created a major bad look for the law firm. Look at the explosive rogue email from February, which Slater & Gordon labelled ‘a hoax’: pay rates of 900 staff laid bare, execs lampooned, resignations triggered. Forensics confirm it was “premeditated and carefully planned.”
- Culprit (alleged): Bridgett Maddox, The former payroll manager, and convicted fraudster who was allegedly behind the email. Metadata and her history line up. She’d been suspended—and Red Flag—months earlier.
- Collateral Damage: Mari Ruiz-Matthyssen, the wrongly accused interim CPO, is suing the firm for negligence and reputational harm after it failed to support her while she got blamed. The Australian
- Contextual Highlights: Don’t forget last year’s underpayment scandal—over 100 staff underpaid ~$300,000; the whistle-blower dismissed, now suing. The firm’s got more HR scandals than any firm should be proud of.
Scratching Beneath the Slater & Gordon PR Veneer
Law firms love to posture about professionalism. Slater & Gordon, though? It’s the poster child for how quickly governance goes off-rails under private equity ownership. Staff getting ball-parked with fatalistic cynicism; HR heads tumbling like dominos; internal leaks morphing into criminal referrals. This isn’t dysfunction—it’s a carousel of incompetent crisis-management theatrics.
Take that email scandal: you may think that revealing everyone’s salaries would at least land the firm in HR hell. Instead, the response was half-hearted denials and finger-pointing. The real kicker is how Ruiz-Matthyssen was scapegoated when she had the temerity to suggest the firm relax its knee-jerk blame culture. Meanwhile, a convicted fraudster allegedly orchestrates the attack, but the only casualty so far is the firm’s credibility.
The result of this debacle is further employee satisfaction is tanking and nobody’s owning the problem—just more exits, more litigation, more public shaking of fists at PR headlines. The firm talks about employee “well-being,” but beneath the platitudes, this is a culture hollering for competent leadership.
