As Barclays sifts through the wreckage of King & Wood Mallesons’ European practice and claims of fresh departures swirl around Ashurst, you have to say that the marriage of Herbert Smith and Australian leader Freehills could have gone worse. A lot worse.
It is often rightly noted that law is a conservative old game, as can be gleaned from the identikit strategies of City law firms. Invest in transactional work and international offices, manage your partnership proactively, half-heartedly corporatise the business and hire a load of non-lawyer professionals with dubious mandates. Makes sense right? Except when everyone …
Continue reading “What does Mishcon know that your managing partner doesn’t?”
‘There is a pause in the activities firms like ours service. The question is, for what? Business may get used to a continuum of uncertainty.’ Steve Cooke, Slaughter and May After a year of mergers, Brexit, and Trump, law firm leaders reflect on the 12 months gone by and size up the year ahead …
Pity the poor pundit obliged to come up with an opinion on the obtusely-forged union of CMS Cameron McKenna, Nabarro and Olswang. Despite representing one of the largest legal mergers in the UK, taking a view on the tie-up, good, bad or indifferent is challenging, not least because the trio have so far been strikingly …
Continue reading “Camerons’ double merger adds up but will it multiply?”
Coming off the back of a 2015 that saw a more robust deal market and greater levels of activity in the real estate sector, the 2016 edition of The Legal 500 UK reflects a legal market which has not experienced this level of growth since 2008. Our coverage of the UK regions illustrates the divergent …
Continue reading “The Legal 500 view: Consolidation and risk define UK legal market”
The headline isn’t great, but it’s not bad either. Judging our annual Legal Business 100 (LB100) results, the industry has done better than expected overall, at least compared to 2015, when the group barely achieved growth despite a relative rebound in the UK and global economy. This year, revenues across the LB100 dipped 2% to …
Continue reading “LB100 firms forced to make own luck as tough times continue”
If there was much to celebrate amid the continued rise of London as an international disputes centre at Legal Business‘ second Commercial Litigation Summit on 24 May, the cloud on the horizon was apparent: the mounting conviction that the UK judiciary is near crisis. Growing administrative burdens, earlier retirements, cuts to judges’ pensions and court …
Continue reading “Not ‘looming’, the judiciary is already in crisis”
It is a recurring theme in Legal Business commentary that the received wisdom and forecasting for the profession do not age like fine wine and 2016 is proof once more that no one knows anything. Take the Bar, which has supposedly been in the last-chance saloon for a generation and yet in the commercial sector …
Continue reading “As the Bar elite thrives, New Law wobbles – scratch some more predictions”
Charlie Geffen argues the legal market is segmenting between two diverging arenas A few years ago the general counsel of one of the big banks told me that they only went to outside law firms for three reasons. First to get advice on what to do. That could be on a deal, a dispute or …
Continue reading “Are you selling judgement or process? Few modern law firms can excel at both”
In the age of the anodyne corporate law firm, you can at least say a marriage of Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) and Greenberg Traurig would be a distinct beast. If the talks are successful, it would be the first major international deal built on the foundation of real estate. It would also be the first …
Continue reading “BLP/Greenberg: unique, compelling, bloody difficult”
