Bad apples on the 24th floor
Dame Margaret Bazley’s report blames alcohol for misbehaviour at Russell McVeagh. Women who have worked there say the rot goes deeper than that. Tom Hunt and Ruby Macandrew report.
This is not how it was meant to be, not this Thursday, not ever. Not here on the 24th floor looking over Wellington Harbour.
But here Russell McVeagh chairman Malcolm Crotty finds himself fronting a scandal that started with his firm but went on to mar the entire New Zealand legal profession.
He is the same man who sat with Stuff management a year or so ago and claimed, hand-onheart, there wasn’t a systemic issue. Sure, there was a bad apple there, sure, there may have been a bad team but – and the impression was clear – the vibe here at Russell McVeagh is hunky-dory.
In some respects Dame Margaret Bazley’s report into the firm goes some way to confirm this, that indeed the bad apples were confined to a dysfunctional team.
‘‘Most people told me Russell McVeagh is a great place to work,’’ she notes in her foreword. But much of the following
87 pages suggests that not all felt that way.
Especially not the four summer clerks who described a Christmas party back in 2015.
It seems an aside, but they were nervous about having to perform a skit in front of the staff. If only they had known in advance that their nerves should have been about a single, drunk, male partner.
It was that man who, allegedly, put his hand around one’s waist, tried to get her to ‘‘skull’’ her drink, then tried to kiss her on the cheek.
He then, it is alleged, touched another’s waist, breast, and bottom. It was he who allegedly touched another’s bottom. And again, allegedly, muttered something outside to a clerk about spilled wine on her top before touching her breasts, her waist, her hips.
‘‘The partner then tried to get into her taxi before another of the clerks shut the car door on him,’’ the report says.
It is also he who later left the firm – though for reasons unrelated to this – and continues to practise law today.
Bazley was at pains to emphasise she was not here to find the alleged guilty or not guilty. That was a job for the courts with all their checks and balances.
And she said that while the incident above did not trigger that partner’s departure, it was two other grubby encounters that did.
That same partner hosted a smaller party a few days later, when it is alleged he again acted drunkenly, in a ‘‘sexually inappropriate’’ manner. The details of what exactly happened were not elaborated on in the
90-page report.
Then there was ‘‘incident three’’ after all had returned from a Christmas break.
A group of solicitors and summer clerks went to a bar, where the same partner bought drinks for them throughout the evening, before an alleged incident involving one of the solicitors took place.
Bazley said alcohol played a ‘‘significant part’’ in the firm over the years, but stressed the clerks did not enable or contribute to any of the incidents.
A few blocks away, Wellington Women Lawyers’ Association convener Steph Dyhrberg was up early yesterday with an advance copy of the report.
She is hopeful it will be the ‘‘nuclear device in the tearoom’’ needed to right things – not just in Russell McVeagh but in the wider profession. Perhaps in wider society too.
That solicitor – the one who is accused of the incidents in the bar – is still out there. Dyhrberg is bound to know his name.
‘‘We are talking about allegations of what I would call a sexual predator,’’ she says. ‘‘We are talking about . . . alleged sexual assaults.’’
Back on the 24th floor, Crotty seems remarkably calm. He is the same one, a year or so ago, who insisted to Stuff that all was rosy – apart from that bad apple, that team.
He now admits: ‘‘We didn’t investigate thoroughly enough
. . . we made a mistake in that respect.’’
He came on as chair in February, meaning the incidents did not happen when he was at the helm, though he was partnership chair at the firm when he spoke to Stuff last year.
And, as Bazley pointed out, the ship has been sailing straight for more than two years now.
But it is Crotty who is now facing down a barrage of media, who is the face of the beleaguered firm and who is promising to right the ship.
He is the one having to say the words – ‘‘we apologise for that’’ – and hint (though not, for confidentiality reasons, confirm) that some sort of compensation for the law clerks has been discussed.
In Queenstown, former lawyer Olivia Wensley – one of the most outspoken against sexual harassment in the law – has read through the 90-page report.
She believes Bazley ‘‘failed to get to the crux of the issue’’ – which is that deep-seated cultural sexism is rife within the profession.
‘‘This report, I think, has been sanitised, it’s been written in a very careful way in that it’s just a PR exercise, it’s windowdressing. She doesn’t actually expose the truly ugly issues.’’
Wensley says the report, which discusses the firm’s inappropriate drinking culture, does more harm than good in putting a lot of the blame on alcohol rather than human error.
‘‘There’s too much emphasis on alcohol – she refers to alcohol 34 times, which is infuriating. It’s a deflection.
‘‘I’ve spoken to hundreds of women and men in the profession and this is doing the legal profession no favours, to just minimise it and try to isolate it into a one-off occurrence, because that’s simply not correct.’’
While the privacy of the women involved in the three named incidents was of the utmost importance, Wensley says the firm’s post-leaving interactions with one of the alleged perpetrators were ridiculous.
‘‘They don’t have to reveal all or intrude on any privacy matters. It’s shocking that this man still today holds a certificate which says he’s a fit and proper person.
‘‘It’s a cop-out and it’s negligent because this man was allowed to leave with a reference and Russell McVeagh continued to work with him for two years afterwards. The Law Society failed to investigate him and it’s negligent to put other young women at risk.’’
Bazley’s report, perhaps less salaciously, delved into bullying at the firm. Ever since the stories about Russell McVeagh started flying, so too have the allegations. Some have been verifiable, others not. This one, received this week, can be confirmed as a former staffer.
‘‘On the first day I started at Russell McVeagh I was warned by the head of HR about the partner I was going to be working for . . . HR could not have been more correct.
‘‘I was working under an absolutely bully. And when I spoke out about it, it only got worse. I was made to look like I had ‘issues’ and lacked resilience.’’
She described how she was made to do a personality test: ‘‘The fact that every single person in that building was aware of my partner’s behaviour to all is a pretty good sign that it was never my personality that was the issue.’’
She described how, with no external support, she became suicidal and depressed, how she dreaded going to work.
‘‘Russell McVeagh was well aware of this. Yet offered no support and nothing was done. Eventually it got to the point where being at Russell McVeagh was putting my life and my safety at risk and I just walked out.
‘‘The short message I have is, no matter what the report shows, Russell McVeagh is well aware of the issues they have, yet they have shown a history of disregarding the needs or rights of anyone except for their partners.’’
It is just after 11am on the
24th floor of Russell McVeagh and Bazley and her people file out into one room, Crotty and his to another.
Catching the lift down, a happy worker jumps in on the
11th floor and spots a photographer. Were you up there, she asks, to see the whale?