Meet Patrick Cook, one of those utterly dedicated individuals who’s made it his business to master every corner of his craft. He came to DW Fox Tucker with an already impressive list of achievements on behalf of his clients, across many facets of business law, and since joining us he’s continued the success in grand style... establishing himself as one of our true experts in the field.
He’s pretty good at being humble, too. When we asked him for the top three reasons he’s so driven towards commercial and corporate law, he said, “Seeing my clients succeed, the odd corporate golf day and dealing with lots of different people from all areas of life”.
Any business big or small is very happy to have Patrick on board.
Patrick’s passion for business law spreads in a perfect symmetry across the biggest end of town to the smallest SMEs and start-ups. Iconic wine businesses, household consumer goods retailers and many fashion labels have left themselves safely in his hands on many matters over the years... meanwhile he’s had global giants like eBay, Ventia and INPEX on the ropes as he’s wrestled them in commercial negotiations on behalf of the ‘little guys’.
To understand someone who clearly loves legal life on both sides of the track in such equal measure, a look back at Patrick’s early days might give us a clue. To say he went straight in at the deep end is an understatement, working for ASIC first as a graduate recruit, then soon after moving into their renowned “Project Wickenby” team as a specialist investigating large scale tax and corporate fraud.
Patrick’s ASIC role working with the ATO, ACCC and Austrac, including the execution of warrants alongside the AFP on high profile raids, is exciting stuff, even to the most experienced lawyers among us.
Patrick has many tales to tell, dating back to Christopher Columbus.
With so much experience in so many varied business arenas, it’s no surprise that Patrick has some fascinating stories to tell. The gripping drama about when he was dragged up to a Darwin LPG processing plant by a couple of oil and gas giants for some high-level intimidation tactics. The passion as he explains how he helped his client sell a business he built up from an initial investment of $500K into a $30m behemoth in 10 short years. The list goes on.
One such yarn dates back to when Patrick was acting for a South Australian client in the negotiation of a joint venture (JV). The JV was with a very large Austrian company, a dinner was had between executives and a few wines were sipped. Patrick’s SA client started proudly touting the long history of their company, “We’ve been around for more than a hundred years don’t you know?”. To which a humble Austrian replied, “Yes, our company has been around a while too, more than 500 years... in fact, you may have heard of one of our early clients, a chap by the name of Christopher Columbus.”
Here’s to many more years of Patrick scoring goals.
As much as we’d like to think Patrick will stay on our team forever, we know the law has only ever been his second choice. Because like George Best, Eric Cantona, David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo before him, he would drop everything, including us, to wear Manchester United’s coveted number 7 shirt.
Although we’ve never seen him kick a soccer ball... and we plan to keep him too busy to practice.