Breaking the circle

When Peter Martyr, the chief executive at Norton Rose, talks about his firm’s strategy, he takes an A4 sheet of paper and turns it horizontally. He draws a row along the bottom – low-margin work – and another across the top, representing the high-end mandates that are largely the preserve of the Magic Circle. And then the clever bit: four pillars that stretch from top to bottom, and signify Norton Rose’s route to market.

To get a piece of the Magic Circle’s action, competitors must choose their battles, and then seek to take on all the work for clients in that chosen area, Martyr says. For Norton Rose, that means sectors including energy, infrastructure and financial institutions, and products like Islamic finance.

‘It’s a pragmatic response to our size,’ he says. ‘We will only ever have ten people to the next person’s 40 if we try to cover everything. We have to tailor our attack in an intelligent way. The acid test for us is this: do we keep the work at the top of those pillars? The answer is yes.’

In the tables that follow, we uncover the firms that are really biting into that top-end work, and taking a slice of the Magic Circle’s pie. We use ten hypothetical case studies to see the alternatives that clients face when they don’t, won’t, or can’t, choose the Magic Circle. Norton Rose scores for listed companies, for flotations on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), for mid-market M&A, and for recruits, but is largely absent from the high-end M&A and finance work.

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