| COVER STORY: Fragile States London's international offices are sized-up |
 You’ve got three ways of looking at it as an English partner at a US firm: they want you for your brains, they want you for your practice, or they’re not quite sure why they’ve got you but it sounded good at the time.
Worry if you’re in the third group: more and more of you are being found out.
Being a well-paid pawn in an ill-conceived plan of attack drawn up in an American boardroom has become the fate of more and more otherwise capable London lawyers. Such pawns now lie strewn across the Square Mile, often victims of their own short-term greed. Let’s not kid ourselves: just as the allure of sometimes a 100%-plus pay hike is substantial, so the gaping chasm between expected and achieved performance is the reason it all went tits up.
English partners we meet often leave their US firm experience utterly deflated and bemused by it all. Laborious efforts to get on panels and network a complex European continent are rarely understood by the cash-is-king, bank-it-now economics of a US partnership used to riding roughshod across the States.
We’re now in a third epoch of growth for the £1.1bn community of US law firms in London. First the pioneers arrived, second came the sheep, and here now is emerging a reality-checked, hard-nosed, knuckled-down set of businesses. It’s not as flash, and the flash harries aren’t as wanton, but it’s what we need most, over here and over there.
Tom Freeman, editor 
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