Feeling the heat

With the exception of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and the restructuring of its equity partnership, firms are rarely ever open about plans to downsize. Talk to any managing partner and they will seldom say that the firm has reached a size with which it is comfortable, even less that it has grown too large and plans to trim back across the board. For whatever reason, growth is automatically always said to be on the horizon.

However, as our tenth Global London (formerly ‘US firms in London’) survey makes clear, the reality is often different. No doubt all 50 of the biggest-billing non-UK origin firms in London included in this survey would claim to be growing steadily in one way or another, but in total headcount terms, almost half are barely any larger than they were five years ago, and 13 are actually smaller. When it comes to growth in London, there are four distinct groups of firms (see ‘Size matters’, page 54).

Overall, the Global London market continues to grow (see chart 1, overleaf), but the buoyant cumulative headcount figures are skewed by Reed Smith’s merger with Richards Butler and extraordinarily rapid growth at White & Case. Despite protestations to the contrary, a number of the firms in this survey – a majority perhaps – have been quite content to enjoy the good times over the last three or four years without manifesting any urgency to grow or diversify their business here.

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