Three more senior litigators have walked from MC to Richmond Chambers. The pattern is now too consistent to be coincidence – and it sharpens a question the firm still hasn’t answered: is the Crown warrant a launchpad, or a liferaft?
John Bowie
Meredith Connell, New Zealand’s oldest Crown Solicitor’s office and, by its own count, New Zealand’s largest litigation firm, has just watched another cohort of senior disputes talent walk down Shortland Street and into Richmond Chambers. Mark Davies, Erin Davies and Julia Carlyon have all surfaced on Richmond’s roster, joining a bench that increasingly reads like an MC partnership reunion.
The firm remains something of a legal media’s gift that keeps giving – more departures, spinoff firms, more intrigue. Rather like Te Pati Maori dressed in 3 piece suits, to use a political image to upset your latte.
Three lateral moves in isolation would be a coincidence. Three more on top of Nick Malarao, Robin McCoubrey and a long tail of earlier exits is a trend line. At some point such trend lines stop being trend lines and start being a quietly executed strategy by somebody. The only question is whose. Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock maybe? Another partner helping to sharpen MC’s focus? Again.
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The Richmond Arrivals
Richmond Chambers has provided sanctuary to MC departees. The Chambers has been visibly “out there” in public commentary, publishing on climate litigation, directors’ duties and construction, and releasing its own AI Governance Guide, while Richmond barristers have been talking AI and “small, nimble” practices at events like the much bally-hooed LawFest.
Mark Davies spent more than 20 years at MC as a lead commercial litigation partner, after prosecuting at Crown Law (including as junior counsel on the Scott Watson trial, with a subsequent Privy Council appearance) and several years at Freehills in Sydney pre-merger. Construction, directors’ duties, Fair Trading Act work, and – usefully for Richmond’s brand mix – sports law for the Blues and other national bodies.
Erin Davies built and led MC’s employment practice for close to a decade, went barrister sole in July 2024, and has now consolidated at Richmond. Workplace investigations, health and safety, harassment, status disputes – the unglamorous backbone of any serious disputes set, and remarkably portable.
Julia Carlyon arrives with construction and infrastructure credentials, FMA and Commerce Commission work, and a CV that includes the Ministry of Education’s leaky-school proceedings against James Hardie and Carter Holt Harvey – still one of the largest product liability cases the country has produced.
Individually: three credible senior hires. Collectively, in the context of who has already left MC for Richmond, this looks less like attrition and more like a sustained migration along a well-worn path.
Profile lawyer Royal Reed (pictured) waved goodbye to the firm at the end of 2025 to form Agile Legal and having previously merged her boutique litigation firm with MC.
The Richmond–MC Pipeline
Nick Malarao – 24 years at MC, senior litigation partner, ex-management board, joined Richmond in July 2024. He has now been appointed an Associate Judge of the High Court, announced 8 May 2026 and taking effect 8 June. That is a meaningful endorsement of the calibre of MC alumni in Richmond’s corridor, though, strictly, his elevation comes from chambers rather than from MC, which is itself part of the story.
Robin McCoubrey – nine years as an MC partner and one of the country’s most respected trial lawyers – went the same way.
Add in the earlier wave MC waved off Kim Francis, Leo Farmer (Shortland), James Cairney and David Johnstone (Bankside) – and the more recent flow of Chris Merrick, Danae Weston (Juno Legal), Jessica Blythe (Luke Cunningham Clere), Jacob Parry (Mills Lane), plus the reported October 2025 cull, and you have something that no longer reads like normal partnership churn. You have a multi-year structural outflow.
But what’s interesting in the procession of departures is that a disproportionate share of those leavers have gone not to competitor full-service firms, but to chambers. People are not leaving MC for Russell McVeagh. They are leaving for their own brass plates, it seems.
Interestingly, long-time Wellington Crown Solicitors Luke Cunningham opened their Auckland outpost in April 2022 following Meredith Connell’s move to the capital when they sought to increase their public law and commercial work. The firm presently has two Auckland partners.
Crown Warrant: Launchpad or Liferaft?
The optimistic reading is that the Crown warrant is a stable, prestigious base from which the firm has been expanding into high-end commercial, regulatory and civil disputes work. Crown work pays the rent; commercial work builds the brand and the profits.
The more cynical reading – who, us? – is that the commercial expansion was always harder to sustain than it looked, that the senior partners who built it have noticed, and that the firm’s much-publicised “strategic review”, officially a refocus on “public interest litigation”, is a retrenchment to the Crown core dressed up in mission-statement language. On that reading the warrant is not a launchpad. It is a liferaft.
Both readings could be partly true. Crown warrants are a fine thing to own – dependable, technically demanding work, structurally insulated from market cycles. They are also, for ambitious commercial litigation partners, an awkward bedfellow: their own rhythms, ceilings on fee rates, and institutional culture. Marry that to a private-sector commercial litigation practice and you are running two quite different businesses inside one partnership, with two different views on remuneration, lateral hiring, and what a good year looks like.
When senior commercial and employment partners – the ones who built the non-Crown side – consistently leave for the independent bar, the inference is hard to avoid: the commercial wing’s strategic priorities are losing the internal argument, or its economics no longer compete with what those partners can earn (and how they can practise) at chambers. Possibly both.
Why Chambers, Specifically?
These partners are not jumping to MinterEllisonRuddWatts or Bell Gully. They are setting up at the bar. That is a different choice and tells you something different.
Joining a competitor firm signals “my old firm’s strategy is wrong.” Joining chambers signals “the partnership model itself isn’t working for me.” The first is solvable by management; the second isn’t. You cannot out-strategy somebody who has decided they would rather not be in a partnership at all.
That decision is being made easier by structural shifts the New Zealand market has been slow to acknowledge. Sophisticated litigation clients increasingly buy the lawyer rather than the letterhead, particularly in regulatory enforcement. AI tooling – as Richmond’s Josh McBride has been happy to point out – lets small operators handle work that once required platoons of juniors. The economic moat around full-service firms in disputes work is narrower than it was a decade ago.
None of which is bad news for MC’s Crown practice. All of which is awkward for any attempt to build a commercial disputes practice on top of it.
In Fairness to MC
There is a defensible counter-narrative. MC remains by far the country’s largest litigation operation. The Auckland Crown warrant generates workflow no chambers set can replicate. The firm has been adding partners as well as losing them – the July 2024 promotion round and subsequent hires are not nothing. And senior partners moving to the bar later in their careers is a feature of every common-law market with a strong independent bar; it does not, by itself, indicate institutional failure.
All true. The question is whether the rate, the seniority and the strategic shape of the departures – commercial and employment leaders disproportionately, heading disproportionately to one chambers set – tells you something larger than a series of individual career decisions.
On the available evidence, it probably does.
The Bigger Picture
Across common-law jurisdictions, the prestige-and-influence map of disputes practice has been quietly redrawn over the past decade. The senior litigators clients actually want are increasingly in chambers, boutiques, or running small specialist outfits. The full-service institutional firm is not dying, but its grip on the top of the disputes market is loosening, particularly in regulatory and white-collar work.
Richmond’s gradual accumulation of senior MC alumni is the most visible local instance. Bankside, Shortland and others are running their own versions of the same play.
For MC, the strategic question is not really about replacing three more senior litigators. It is whether the firm’s identity for the next decade is “the country’s premier Crown and public-interest litigation house” – a perfectly respectable thing to be – or “a full-service disputes powerhouse with a Crown warrant attached.” The senior commercial talent has been voting with its feet on which of those two futures it finds more credible.
The Crown warrant isn’t going anywhere. The question is what gets built on top of it. On the current trajectory, the answer is starting to look like: a little less than the firm’s leadership presumably had in mind.
As for Richmond Chambers – they appear to be having a very good year. It helps when the talent comes to you.
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