The Greek philosopher Socrates wrote that the secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

The recent Covid-interrupted years have afforded us the choice of fighting for a return to "old" ways of working or focusing on building something new.

Old is perhaps easily defined as a rigid five day a week, in the office expectation. Exactly what "new" looks like is still the subject of some debate in many organisations.

For Bartier Perry building on this change is guided by three simple principles:

• The way we work must be guided by putting clients at the centre of everything we do. Every client is unique and therefore we need to be flexible and provide options.
• To provide our clients with the best advice we need the best people, and they too want flexibility and options in their working lives.
• Any new working model must ensure there is connection so that our culture is nurtured, and guidance and mentoring provided. That benefits both our people and our clients.

An end of lease gave us the opportunity to begin shaping that approach of "building something new," from the ground-up when designing a new working environment.

After more than a decade in our existing space, last month we moved down the street from level 10, 77 Castlereagh Street to level 25, 161 Castlereagh Street Sydney.

Our new space is one designed to welcome and encourage clients to visit us but equally with the integrated technology that allows for seamless online only or hybrid meetings.

An absence of walled offices, set desks and plenty of collaborative spaces enables greater connection and collaboration among our people and is aimed at allowing younger lawyers in particular to learn alongside their peers.

Encouraging, developing, and providing new challenges and outlooks for the talent in our firm is one of the most important roles of any leadership group and flows on to our clients.

I'm delighted then that the firm's focus on this was recently recognised in the Lawyers Weekly Awards. Partner Gavin Stuart was named Mentor of the Year in a category which also saw our Private Clients Partner, Lisa To, named as a finalist.

I am also very pleased to be able to announce our new promotions that has flowed as a result of Bartier Perry's mentoring investment.

In the case of new partner Laura Raffaele, her appointment in our Environment and Planning team comes 11 years after she joined the firm as a paralegal.

Laura and all our new promotions will bring new energy and ideas as we help clients navigate change.

You can read about our new cohort of promotions here.

We look forward to welcoming you to our new offices, and hope that you will enjoy the space as much as we do.