| COVER STORY: Who needs Ashurst Fried Frank's Valerie Ford Jacob embarks on some hastily revised London plans |
In this month's issue Rough winds do shake the darling duds of May. What, for most partners, is month one of the new financial year has many virtues, principal among them the fact that 11 more months separate it from the next end-of-year budget. What's more, the full joys/horror of the amassed billings of 2004 are still a few weeks away from a final, audited finale. And doesn't your FD know it. You've already spotted him standing that much taller in the lift, all too comfortable with his seasonal powers of critique. After all, he seems to radiate, as his hand gently hits the button for the top floor, it wasn't him who didn't hit budget. Take the stairs. What one really needs at these times, when the capital markets look frankly parochial and M&A remains an ampersand short of dealflow, is a fight. Lovells and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer are well aware of that. The £100m-plus in fees that the two firms are set to draw from the battle of BCCI's liquidators against the dear old Bank of England is reaching its first climax: Gordon Pollock is coming close to actually finishing his gargantuan opening address for the claimants, having first started up in January. We assess just how the drama is poised in this handsome theatre of lawyers - for that is what it is. See 'Breaking the Bank' on page 38. Bank on this: Pollock's eternal summer is far from fading.
Tom Freeman, Editor | LEGAL BUSINESS APPOINTMENTS | PRITCHARD
Paying for what you created | NEWS
Falling profits and higher targets: Simmons faces up to grim reality |  PARTNER DEBT Payback time
Legal Business exclusively reveals the conditions of Clifford Chance's private placement, and assesses the challenges faced by UK firms that want to balance sensible borrowing with strategic progression. Richard Lloyd reports | BANK OF ENGLAND ON TRIAL Breaking the Bank
As BCCI's liquidators seek compensation from Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer's favourite client, the Bank of England, Britain's biggest litigation - 11 years in the making - is only now hotting up, as Matthew Rushton discovers |  PRO BONO SPECIAL Assistance solicitors
Some of London's sharpest legal minds follow a hard slog in the City with an evening at Aldgate's Toynbee Hall, giving up their free time to advise on parking tickets, marriage breakdowns and theft. Vanessa Pawsey examines a sometimes gritty, but nearly always invaluable, legal service | JACOB PROFILE Jacob's ladder to Europe
Valerie Ford Jacob is indefatigable, a New York capital markets lawyer increasingly aware of her powers. As co-managing partner of Fried Frank and principal proponent of her firm's Ashurst merger talks, she could have withered with their collapse. Instead, she hired Ashurst's erstwhile managing partner, Justin Spendlove, and is asking him to create a European firm. Claire Smith can't fault her ambition |  BRISTOL FOCUS The industrious revelation
Bristol is often overshadowed by Birmingham, derided as quaint when compared to the larger, more uncouth Midlands conurbation. Such a view is naive, claim Bristol's growing number of cutting-edge commercial law firms. Stephen J Doggett runs a credibility test |  OFFSHORE FOCUS Continental drift
Jersey and Guernsey may be close, but BVI, Cayman and Bermuda are several flying hours away. Increasingly, though, the global offshore community is working together, to provide a service for a world immune to timezones. Mairead Keohane and Alan Lamb analyse how this is being done, and what the regulators make of it all | | CORPORATE | | FINANCE | | REAL ESTATE | | LITIGATION | | TMT | | INTERNATIONAL | | BACK PAGE |
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