Brock
Fisher

Brock isn’t a lawyer and doesn’t pretend to be. He runs everything else.

Why a small law firm has a business manager

A law firm is a business before it’s anything else. Premises, phones, software, suppliers, insurance, trust accounting, invoices going out and bills coming in. None of it is legal work, but all of it has to run – or there’s no firm for the legal work to happen in.

When nobody owns that, the lawyer usually does. It gets done late at night, or on the weekend, and the practice ends up capped by how much administrative load one person can carry while also running files.

Clients and matters are Danielle’s, and they should be. Everything underneath that is Brock’s – the facilities, the systems, the suppliers, the accounts, the cashflow, the reporting.

This distinction allows Danielle to spend her working day actually being a lawyer.

Service businesses, at scale

Brock spent twenty years in residential property management, moving from technical roles into leadership. He was General Manager and then Chief Operations Officer of Rental Express, and a shareholder in the business, at a point when it managed around 5,000 properties – more than ten times the size of a typical rent roll at the time.

After Rental Express was acquired by the Little Group, he took a national role as Manager of Operational Excellence and then joined the executive team as Executive General Manager, Operational Support. The business was by then the largest property management company in Australia, with close to 23,000 properties under management. He later moved to the group’s software business and spent five years at Kolmeo, first in product and then as Executive Manager, Industry and Partnerships, helping build the technology platform real estate businesses use to manage their rental portfolios.

The Little Group actually has no connection with Little Estate Lawyers whatsoever. Little is Danielle’s surname, the coincidence is genuinely just a coincidence, but it has caused a certain amount of confusion over the years.

None of that work was legal work. All of it was the same challenge. Large numbers of people, each dealing with something that matters a great deal to them personally, all of whom need to be communicated with properly, not wanting to know about your internal processes, just whether or not they work. The difference between a good service business and a bad one is rarely technical knowledge. It’s whether the system holds when it’s under load.

What he does here

Brock handles as much of the non-legal side of the firm as can be handed over. He’s also a Justice of the Peace (Qualified), which is a small thing that turns out to matter. Estate matters generate a steady stream of statutory declarations and documents that need witnessing, usually at the exact moment when a client least needs another errand. It can be done here.

And he produces all of the firm’s educational content – the YouTube channel, the podcast, the articles, and everything on the social channels. That library exists because good legal guidance is expensive, and many of the people who need it can’t afford to buy an hour of a lawyer’s time to get it. So the firm gives away what it can, continuing a trend Brock embraced during his time in real estate.

He’s written regularly for Elite Agent and The Property Management Journal, coached on Elite Agent’s Transform program in 2020, 2021 and 2023, and delivered keynotes at the PPM Group National Conference in 2024, CustomerGauge’s Monetize! conference in 2018, and ARPM in 2017.