John Molnar is an Australian lawyer based in Melbourne, Victoria, who was a partner of the national law firm Phillips Fox. He studied law at Monash University and was admitted to the bar in Victoria in 1980.
Education
John Molnar studied law at Monash University, which was founded in 1958 by the Monash University Act and named after the World War I general Sir John Monash. Its law school was established in the early 1960s, when David Derham became foundation dean; the Monash Bachelor of Laws was designed to teach law graduates transferable legal skills as well as the substance of the law.
He also holds a diploma from the Australian Institute of Insurance. The insurance institute movement in Victoria began in 1884, when the Victorian Insurance Institute was formed, and the state institutes later became the Australian Insurance Institute, which merged with the Insurance Institute of New Zealand in 2000 to form the Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance (ANZIIF).
Career
John Molnar was admitted to the bar in Victoria in 1980. He later worked as a partner of Phillips Fox, a Melbourne-based law firm whose name derived from an older Melbourne practice, Phillips Fox & Masel.
The firm operated under the collective Phillips Fox name from 1985 to 2006, and its successor's history describes it as the first national law firm in Australia. It grew through mergers, including the absorption of the Perth firm Majteles Salmon in 1998 and the insolvency practice of Hely Edgar in 1999. At the time it was to rebrand as DLA Phillips Fox, it was a full-service firm prominent in the insurance field, with 160 partners, 1,400 staff, and offices in Australia, New Zealand and Vietnam.
The Phillips Fox entity was dissolved on 2 May 2011, after the global firm DLA Piper opened for business in Australia and absorbed the firm.
