Quid pro quo

The combined turnover of the top 100 UK firms hit £9.11bn in 2007, while the two largest – Clifford Chance and Linklaters – both raked in more than £1bn each. To the leading financial institutions, this amounts to a client base that they simply cannot afford to ignore.

Citibank was the first bank to operate with a dedicated law firm group, having established its team in New York over 30 years ago. ‘When the business started in our head office, we already had a number of law firms and attorneys as clients, but we recognised the commonality of the issues in the sector and the need to consolidate the intellectual capital within the bank around it,’ explains James Tsolakis, who relocated from New York to set up the US giant’s UK arm in 2002. This was done in response to the increasingly global demands of the bank’s US law firm customers.

Tsolakis believes that further operations are inevitable if the bank wants to follow its clients – which now include 550 law firms and 35,000 attorneys – in their quest for international expansion. ‘We are looking at establishing a dedicated team in Asia, with Hong Kong as the Asia hub in the same way that London is our European hub,’ he adds.

Lloyds TSB, meanwhile, established its solicitors’ banking group in November 2007, having already seen the benefits of a more focused approach to sectors such as healthcare and agriculture.

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