A story behind Batt Griffith Legal

By Rebekah Griffith, Director, Batt Griffith Legal

I have been asked more than once since we changed our name to Batt Griffith Legal why I wanted to take on the firm Rosey Batt built. It is a fair question, and it deserves a proper answer rather than the short version I usually give in passing conversation.

The honest answer starts a long time before I ever sat across a boardroom table from Rosey. I decided I wanted to be a lawyer when I was eleven. I could not have told you then what a conveyance was, or the difference between a will and an enduring power of attorney, but I already loved the idea of standing up for people and working out how to get them to a fair outcome. Looking back, I think that instinct actually started at home, arguing my case to my siblings and, more importantly, to my parents. Some of my earliest and most passionately prepared submissions were on why dessert absolutely needed to include ice-cream. I lost plenty of those arguments too, which is probably where I learned that a good outcome usually comes from listening as much as arguing. That is negotiation and mediation in miniature, and it has never really left me.

By the time I met Rosey, that childhood instinct had grown into a career, but working alongside her sharpened it into something else. What struck me first was not just how she practised law, careful, compassionate, and always plain-English rather than showing off with jargon, but how she practised it as one part of a much fuller life. Rosey runs marathons. She sits on a variety of boards. And on top of all of that, she teaches for the Australian Institute of Company Directors, passing on to other directors the same clear thinking she brings to her clients. Watching someone build a legal career like that, one that never crowded out the rest of who she is, told me everything about the kind of firm I wanted to help lead.

I will admit my own version of "outside of law" looks a little different. You are more likely to find me with dirt under my fingernails in the vegetable patch than crossing a finish line, and my idea of a big weekend often involves getting lost in a good book rather than a board pack. But I think the underlying thing is the same: a life with room in it for something other than work makes you a better lawyer, not a worse one. It keeps you patient. It keeps you human. Clients notice that, especially the ones who are trusting us with the business or the family they have spent their whole lives building.

That is really what drew me to take this on. Most of our clients do not want to be handed between lawyers, or treated as a file number at a big city firm. They want someone who knows their name, their business, and their story, and who will still be there for the next matter and the one after that. That has always been Rosey's way of practising, and it is why our clients stay with us for decades, often bringing their children and their businesses to us in turn. Carrying that forward, under a name that now carries mine alongside hers, is not something I take lightly.

What I love most, though, is the team around me. I did not inherit a firm so much as inherit a group of people who genuinely care whether a client's problem actually gets solved, not just closed off. That shows up in the small things: someone staying back to finish a client call properly rather than rushing it, or flagging an issue for a client before they have even thought to ask about it. It is a rare thing to find a team that treats a client's business as if it were their own, and I do not intend to take that for granted.

So when people ask why I wanted to step into this role, the truest answer is that I saw, in Rosey, the kind of lawyer and the kind of person I had been working my way toward becoming since I was eleven years old, and I wanted to help build something that could keep that going for the next generation of clients in Adelaide, Kangaroo Island and beyond. That is the promise behind everything we do at Batt Griffith Legal: we are not here for one matter. We are here to be your legal partner for life.