Peak practice

When Legal Business published its first LB100 survey in 1993, Linklaters’ incoming managing partner Simon Davies was in only his second year as a qualified solicitor and DLA Piper’s ubiquitous joint chief executive Nigel Knowles had just moved from Sheffield to Leeds, hoping to expand a fledgling corporate practice there.

Both have done well to progress so quickly, given that our first survey was a gloomy one, revealing a market deep in recession, with redundancies looming and partners getting jittery at the threat of a new era of tough management. ‘Dire, dire, dire’ was how one managing partner described conditions that year. Fortunately, we do not have to report the same this year. The fifteenth annual Legal Business 100 finds the UK’s leading law firms at the peak of their game.

The market has certainly come a long way in 15 years, although perhaps it has not changed as much as one might have predicted back then. The Magic Circle has a sixth member, Herbert Smith, and although consolidation in the market has occurred, it has been a slow process. Fifty-six of the firms in this year’s LB100 appeared in that first survey in one form or another. Globalisation has been a theme of the last decade-and-a-half, as has the corporatisation of law firms. As we anticipated, management has generally got tougher (and where it hasn’t, the firm has often fallen by the wayside) and the shift of perception away from viewing legal services as primarily something for the public good to purely commercial business has continued apace. Meanwhile, through boom and bust, industry-wide revenues and profits have ultimately continued their inexorable drift upwards.

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