Leading M&A lawyer Ian Cochrane started his own firm after 17 years as a partner at Corrs and Mallesons. He tells Justin Whealing how his journey to Australia from his native South Africa came about, and why he especially enjoys a Little Creatures beer after work.

Ian Cochrane faced a choice. It was 1986 and the 31-year-old was married with two children and was already a partner with a major South African law firm. While life for all intents and purposes was good, the reality of working within the apartheid system had placed him in the unenviable position of having to choose between uprooting his family, or staying at home and dealing with physical threats against his children and an uncertain professional future.

"I had grown up with the Zulus and always thought that they loved me, but found rapidly that the frustrations that some of these poor chaps had to deal with, through the system that they lived within, that we all lived within, led to very high emotions and tensions," Cochrane says as he casts his mind back almost 25 years.

At the time, Cochrane was exposed to "a highly politicised and intelligent black academia" while acting for his firm, Cox Yeats and Partners, and its commercial clients in industrial relations matters.

"I was sitting there, at 31 years old, with kids of five and three, and having threats against them made on a regular basis," he says. "It got very uncomfortable and I ultimately made the decision to come to Perth."

In Perth, Cochrane hit the ground running and knocked on the doors of 11 law firms, with 10 offering him a position. He recalls, laughing with wry amusement, that he has never forgotten which firm it was that knocked him back.

When it came time to pick a firm to start his professional life in Australia, he opted for Keall Brinsdon - which later became Corrs Chambers Westgarth - becoming a partner in 1988.

While he was involved in some notable deals during his time at Corrs, including advising The Challenge Bank when it was acquired by Westpac in 1995, it was a desire to be involved in some of the major M&A deals that led him to move to Mallesons Stephen Jaques in 1999.

"I was at a stage in my career where I quite clearly wanted to be at a firm that was in the top-tier, and at that stage, Corrs wasn't," he says, acknowledging that Corrs has lifted its profile since then.

As opposed to the 1990s, the first decade of the new century was booming.

The Sydney Olympics put Australia on the international stage, the resources boom kicked in, private equity entrants drove the capital markets to dizzying highs and M&A lawyers at the blue-chip law firms were cashing in.

Cochrane acted on some significant transactions during this period, including advising Franco-Nevada on the $US24 billion three-way merger with Normandy Mining Limited and Newmont Mining in 2002 (which created the largest gold mining company in the world) and a deal in which a client, Epic Energy, sold its interests in the Dampier to Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline in October 2004.

Despite these big deals, Cochrane was becoming increasingly frustrated at the associated structure and costs that necessitated running a big firm.

He found a sympathetic ear in Michael Lishman, who was the head of the firm's M&A group, and in 2006 they decided to leave Mallesons and start Cochrane Lishman together in Perth.

While it was the chance to work on big transactions that drove Cochrane into the embrace of a big firm, it was also the nature of working within a big firm that turned him away.

"We both became aware of the fact that the big firm model, particularly in the M&A space, was starting to fracture and show some signs of strain," he says.

Cochrane cites the high leverage ratio at large firms as increasingly frustrating his key clients who "wanted to see the partner or senior associate, not hordes of young lawyers doing research on things that may or may not matter".

Cochrane was also having to knock back work due to the pitfalls of conflict of interest issues, which he was finding increasingly difficult to deal with.

"What we were constantly finding was that the strength of the Mallesons banking and finance division was such that we would start acting for someone on a takeover and find that the firm's Sydney or Melbourne office was acting for one of the financiers on the other side of the deal, and we would have to go to the local people and say 'sorry, these other guys are more important and you come second'," he says. "That made it very difficult for me over many years, in dealing with clients who were also friends."

In starting their own firm, the new partners were determined to do things their own way.

"We devised this new model which has very little leverage at all," Cochrane says. "We essentially put our rates up a bit, but we work [fewer] hours than we did at Mallesons, and yet we improved our margin because one of the functions of leverage is that you have to have the infrastructure to deal with it."

The firm has been successful during its short time in the market.

Cochrane says that "almost 100 per cent of my clients came across with me" and while he admits that by leaving Mallesons he "won't act on the takeover of Coles by Wesfarmers", his firm, now named Cochrane Lishman Carson Luscombe with seven partners and seven lawyers, was ranked 10th for announced M&A deals in Australia and New Zealand on the Bloomberg Legal Advisor Tables for the first half of 2010.

Importantly, Cochrane also has more time to devote to his family, golf, diving and fishing, as well as to wearing his other corporate hat as the chairman of Little World Beverages Limited, which brews Little Creatures beer in Fremantle.

Cochrane met a number of the owners of Little Creatures, including Phil Sexton and Nic Trimboli who founded the Matilda Bay Brewing Company, through work. While at Corrs, Cochrane acted for Carlton and United Breweries when it purchased Matilda Bay Brewing.

"When Little Creatures floated, they asked me to be Chairman, so I have had that relationship with them for a long time and I am very comfortable with them," he says."They are amazingly talented people and it is an extremely stimulating and ... exciting experience."