Experience Matters
Keith Harvey has more than forty years of experience in banking, accounting and law.
Prior to entering legal practice Keith worked for Westpac, National Australia Bank and ANZ in retail, business and corporate banking roles with a four-year side trip into merchant banking.
Bankers are in the business of understanding, taking and then managing those risks. Importantly, bankers must be able to understand new opportunities that clients have identified. Similarly, business lawyers must understand business risks and their client’s capacity to manage novel situations or solutions before they can advise on and assist their clients manage those risks and exploit opportunities.
Business structures and transactions create a bundle of rights and obligations. Lawyers need years of experience in order to be able to quickly identify the strong and weak links in that bundle before they can assist a client understand and manage a transaction and put in place the best structures. By doing this your lawyer can assist you achieve a better return on a transaction, reduce the risk or assist in negotiating a compromise when parties are in dispute.
Ambry Legal relies heavily on IT solutions and intellectual property that has been created over many years. While a modern law firm can do most things remotely, he feels a need to know more about his clients than can be gleaned over the phone or via a zoom meeting. Keith will often visit your business premises to better understand what you do and why. Other times he will work closely with your accountant or other professional advisers.
Our business model includes outsourcing work to other legal practitioners who have intellectual property, knowledge, experience, systems and procedures outside our primary areas of practice. We will also outsource work to practitioners who can do work more cost effectively than us. However, Keith remains your point of contact and the person responsible and accountable for work done by others.
Keith has formal qualifications and experience in economics and finance, accounting and law and has published several textbooks and many journal articles on taxation and business law issues. Ambry Legal took the first GST case to the High Court.
Keith is a beekeeper, he loves to travel and he gets a buzz out of mentoring clients and colleagues.
Keith has the following formal qualifications:
- Bachelor of Business (Curtin)
- Bachelor of Laws (Deakin)
- Master of Laws (Melbourne)
Keith has been admitted to practice in the:
- High Court of Australia
- Supreme Court of Victoria
- Supreme Court of New South Wales
Keith has the following memberships:
- Member, Law Institute of Victoria
- Fellow, Taxation Institute of Victoria
And, prior to commencing his legal career, Keith was a Fellow of:
- CPA Australia
- Financial Services Institute of Australia
- Chartered Governance Institute
