The Interview
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48 MINUTES
DANNY GILBERT AM
With Rob Langton
CO-FOUNDER & MANAGING PARTNER: GILBERT + TOBIN
So I want to ask you about the launch of Gilbert + Tobin in January 1988, how did the partnership between you and Tony Tobin come together and what was the outcome? Oh, well, we talked about it for a year or two before we did it. And we just, you know, we started with our own clients, and we built from there - we got our big break when we got involved in the litigation of Fairfax. We managed to get a bit of action and that was widely reported and someone said that this firm that nobody’s ever heard of seems to have a role in all of this. We had very few resources to be able to do it, but yeah, that was good. And you know, at the end of the first year or after a little while, you start to think about what you’ve achieved and then you think about, well, we’ve done this one, let’s see if we can take it to another level and we decided to talk to a few other blokes that I’d known around the place. We thought that there was room to move into the telecommunications space. The market was about to deregulate and so we decided we build a division focussing on telecommunications and next thing you know we’re acting for Optus. And then we decided we’d have a media practise and we had to think about, well, who were the big media players that we might be able to act for in Australia? We didn’t think there was much prospect of getting in
bed with the Fairfax’s who owned the Herald and we didn’t think we had any chance of doing any work for Murdoch, but we thought we did have a chance. We might get to, you know, get some work out of Kerry Packer. And so through various means, we met the Packer interests and we brought other people in who had connections with those people, and we started acting for the Packer interests and Channel Nine and that was a very successful thing for us to do for many years. Was that deliberate to focus on those sectors that were particularly hot at the time, in particular Media and Telecommunications? Media, telecommunications, whilst maintaining a sort of a corporate presence as well. So, it wasn’t too speculative. Then in about 2001, we decided that we would maintain our technology and media practise, but we would broaden the scope and start to build a corporate practise and sort of take on the establishment that had been around variously for 100-odd years or more and see if we could take some market share from them. That was quite a contested opinion amongst the ten or 12 partners that we had at that time. Some felt that we had been successful in building this sort of media technology boutique and to sort of abandon that and try to build a corporate practise that people felt would
8 –April / May 2023
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