Legal career Holt served his articles of clerkship with the firm of Fink, Best & Miller. He was admitted to the Victorian Bar in late 1932, and opened his own legal practice the following year. However, clients during the Depression were scarce and frequently underpaid, so Holt lived in a boardinghouse and often relied upon the hospitality of friends. Drawing on his family connections in show business, he eventually accepted an offer to become secretary of the Victorian Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association, a film industry lobby group. In this capacity he appeared several times before the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration.Australian Dictionary of Biography. 1996Frame (2005), p. 9. This had a positive effect on his own practice, and he eventually took on two partners, first Jack Graham and later James Newman.Frame (2005), p. 13. The firm of Holt, Graham, & Newman was dissolved in 1963, following a financial dispute and subsequently reconstituted as Holt, Newman, & Holt, with Holt's son Sam as the new addition. Holt's involvement in the practice declined once he entered politics and ceased altogether in 1949, although he did not formally retire until assuming the prime ministership.Frame (2005), p. 306.
Legal career Holt served his articles of clerkship with the firm of Fink, Best & Miller. He was admitted to the Victorian Bar in late 1932, and opened his own legal practice the following year. However, clients during the Depression were scarce and frequently underpaid, so Holt lived in a boardinghouse and often relied upon the hospitality of friends. Drawing on his family connections in show business, he eventually accepted an offer to become secretary of the Victorian Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association, a film industry lobby group. In this capacity he appeared several times before the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration.Australian Dictionary of Biography. 1996Frame (2!005), p. 9. This had a positive effect on his own practice, and he eventually took on two partners, first Jack Graham and later James Newman.Frame (2005), p. 13. The firm of Holt, Graham, & Newman was dissolved in 1963, following a financial dispute and subsequently reconstituted as Holt, Newman, & Holt, with Holt's son Sam as the new addition. Holt's involvement in the practice declined once he entered politics and ceased altogether in 1949, although he did not formally retire until assuming the prime ministership.Frame (2005), p. 306.