Berwin Leighton Paisner is a decade old this year, a period marked by impressive financials, a revolving door of partners and tentative international expansion. LB assesses the firm ahead of its difficult teenage years.
Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) managing partner Neville Eisenberg is impeccably well prepared for our meeting. Next to his black coffee he has printed e-mails and details of the firm’s financials over the past ten years. In his soft South African brogue, his responses are polished and littered with management-speak. He gives nothing away. But one question gives him pause – when asked if he will stand for re-election next year, he hesitates before answering cautiously: ‘Obviously I’m thinking about it.’ However, he says it’s still early days.
Eisenberg was elected managing partner of legacy firm Berwin Leighton 12 years ago, scraping into the top job by just one vote. He himself admits it’s a long time to be in the job. ‘The thing about being in management is that it’s so intense, there is no beginning and no end. It takes quite a bit of getting used to,’ he says.
His term is up in April next year but he claims he is not jaded: ‘The job today is completely different from what it used to be, so I haven’t felt that I’ve been doing the same job for ten years and that I’m bored.’
Eisenberg was just 37 when he became managing partner in 1999. A corporate lawyer by trade, he hadn’t held a senior role before taking the top job.
“Of course I had my doubts. No strategy is risk free.”
– Neville Eisenberg
‘It was all quite nerve-wracking. I hadn’t been centre stage in management before,’ he says. His election platform was simple: Berwin Leighton was stagnating and needed a merger, fast. Within 18 months of being elected, he’d pulled it off, merging with Paisner & Co in 2001. Over the following decade he embarked on an aggressive lateral hiring program, attempting to shift the firm away from its property roots and grow the business both at home and abroad.
Despite being in the job for over a decade, Eisenberg doesn’t come across as a typical leader. He is slightly awkward, tensing up when discussions veer slightly away from law firm strategy and relaxing once the tape recorder is switched off.
Eisenberg’s tight management grip has reaped rewards: last year the firm pulled in four times as much revenue as it did in 2000/01. But this has come at a price: rumours of discontent among junior partners are rife, and detractors claim that an exclusive management clique has eroded much of the collegiality that made the firm a pleasant place to work. Despite the successes of the past ten years, the firm remains a strangely awkward beast, at times bullish and self-promotional but also painfully worried about its reputation in the market, with partners fiercely ‘on message’. Indeed, partners who spoke to LB for this feature in an official capacity were given multiple pages of typed A4 notes with key BLP talking points by the PR team, effectively a script, so perhaps Eisenberg was right in saying that all the partners would agree with him.
Comfort zone
There’s no question that in the last ten years those well-managed partners at BLP have come a long way. Top of the priority list for the new look firm in 2001 was to shed its reputation as a purely real estate-focused practice. Developing corporate and finance, which essentially acted as support functions to the firm’s property practice, was seen as key for growth.
After the merger, Berwin Leighton’s real estate practice was immediately bolstered by Paisner’s corporate practice. The firm then set about an aggressive and impressive campaign to enhance its reputation in a number of commercial practice areas. Indeed, in the overview of the 2007 edition of The Legal 500 the editor noted: ‘This year’s most-improved firm is unquestionably BLP… [It] has proved unequivocally in recent years that it is far from a one-trick pony.’
BLP’s ambition to expand outside of its comfort zone certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed. Since 2004 the firm has frequently been in the press for a number of big name and expensive lateral hires, with hopes that new business would come pouring through the doors of Adelaide House.
‘We co-located the real estate finance team and that move put it next to real estate. It may pay dividends.’
Matthew Kellett, BLP
While some of those hires brought with them big books of business (commercial litigator Graham Shear arrived from Teacher Stern in 2009 with 200 boxes of files and cases), the success of other hires has been mixed.
The first major acquisition was Robert MacGregor, who now runs BLP’s real estate practice. At the time of his 2004 hire from Clifford Chance, many questioned why MacGregor moved to a mid-market firm from his lofty Magic Circle perch.
MacGregor was brought in on a three-year guaranteed pay deal of over £1.4m a year. The investment has paid off, as the firm’s property group has retained its position as one of the stronger performers in London. In what continues to be a sluggish and relatively depressed property market, BLP’s real estate practice saw revenue climb by 20% during 2010/11, billing £60m of the firm’s £221m fee income.
This boils down to a very clear strategy of having a multi-disciplinary real estate practice, says MacGregor.
‘We think we grew market share,’ he says. ‘We had a good year because of the big deals that got done. We did a good proportion of them.’
The next big money hire was MacGregor’s former CC colleague, tax partner Michael Wistow, who joined BLP in 2007. At the time, City skeptics again questioned BLP’s play for a big name tax partner. Wistow, also brought in on a substantial £1m pay package, was immediately tasked with building up BLP’s tax practice. In 2010/11, the group contributed £21.5m to the firm’s top line, representing 10% of the overall billings and has fashioned a strong reputation in the market. Although the group is not the highest ranking tax practice in the City (it sits in the third tier for corporate tax in The Legal 500), its standing among City firms is growing.
TRUE ROMANCE
It’s a true love story. Law firm looks for partner, dates around and realises that its soulmate was right in front of it the whole time. This is the common description used by Berwin Leighton Paisner partners who were around when legacy firms Berwin Leighton and Paisner & Co finally tied the knot in 2001.
‘It just made sense for us to come together. We were chasing the same work and trying to recruit the same people,’ recalls head of corporate finance David Collins.
Collins was part of the four-partner negotiating team at Paisners, which also included senior partner Harold Paisner, litigation chief Jonathan Sacher and former managing partner Stephen Rosefield.
On the Berwins side, the clear view that a merger needed to happen began to take shape at a partner conference in 1999. A young Neville Eisenberg had delivered a strategy paper, which got the partners thinking about branching out from the legacy firm’s real estate practice. Eisenberg says the partners gave him the mandate to pursue a merger and away he went.
He recalls that he met Harold Paisner five months into his term as managing partner at Berwins and was told: ‘If our firm ever decided to merge, it would be with a firm like Berwin Leighton.’ What ensued were five months of ‘lively discussions’ between the two firms, with Paisners’ four-partner negotiating committee meeting with Berwin’s five-partner team, which included Eisenberg, corporate chief John Bennett, current chairman Peter Robinson, tax consultant Tom Lyon and funds partner Antony Grossman, on several occasions to hash out a deal.
The discussions between the two climaxed after the summer of 2000 and continued into October that year. When talk of a merger leaked to the press right before Christmas, the two decided to pen the deal.
‘Of course I had my doubts. No strategy is risk free,’ says Eisenberg. ‘But on the other hand I knew that I had a mandate from the partners to find a merger partner.’
Paisners also needed a merger partner in order to take the firm on to the next level, and for this reason, Eisenberg says he was confident it was the right thing to do.
The merger went live in May 2001 and while there were some naysayers who wouldn’t back the deal, the majority of the partners were all for it.
‘We had a very good team managing the integration process and so when the merger went live all we had to do was press the button and smash the two firms together,’ says Eisenberg.
Paisners slowly moved out of its Bouverie House offices and into Berwin Leighton’s Adelaide House headquarters, with the newly merged firm acquiring an additional building in order to give a home to the 300 new staff that would occupy the space. ‘We were all very euphoric,’ says Sacher of the merger. ‘It was exactly what we wanted.’
‘The merger was a huge success,’ boasts Bennett. ‘The industry has been littered with failed mergers and I don’t think anyone can argue that ours wasn’t a success.’
Despite a few departures in 2007, namely the exit of tax partner Jonathan Levy to Reynolds Porter Chamberlain, the firm’s 22-partner group continues to grow and boasts itself as one of the biggest in the City.
While most firms were scaling back their tax practices during the recession, BLP was building its. The firm added Kevin Cummings from Allen & Overy in 2008 and Michael McKenna from Goldman Sachs in the same year.
‘In the three years I have been here, the firm has been true to its word. It wanted to do something a bit different. [And we now have the] largest and broadest tax group in the City,’ says Wistow.
Meanwhile, the firm’s litigation practice has been buoyed by the addition of a number of new partners, both on the junior and senior level.
‘My reasons to come to BLP were that I wanted a large legal platform to work from,’ explains Shear, who left his post as managing partner of Teacher Stern to join the City outfit. ‘BLP fit that criteria.’
The addition of commercial disputes chief Nathan Willmott, who joined from Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in 2007, is another notable success for the firm. He has since built a successful financial services regulatory practice. The firm regularly advises on Financial Services Authority (FSA) investigations and projects for a number of regulators and stock exchanges. Willmott’s arrival was further enforced by the recruitment of Sidney Myers in 2009 from Allen & Overy. The group now gets its fair share of the glut of FSA work, including acting for a fund manager caught in a July raid by the FSA and City of London Police. An area not traditionally associated with a real estate-focused firm.
“It was all going fine until the downturn hit and those pay deals came out of the partner profits”
According to group head Jonathan Sacher, the firm’s disputes practice has more than tripled its turnover since the 2001 merger. ‘We utilised well over 100% [of our capacity] and the pipeline of very complex and interesting work is long,’ he explains with pride. The group grew revenue by 30% during the 2010/11 year to £34m.
Recognising it should make a mark in the finance world, Eisenberg identified the practice early on as one of the key areas the firm needed to develop.
As BLP began to knit together a growing finance practice, it turned to structured finance chief Tamara Box, wooing her away from Lovells in 2006. The ambitious Texan is one of the more notable names within the firm’s finance group.
It also turned to former Clifford Chance partner Paul Severs in the same year, with hopes that he and Box would team up and bring in copious amounts of work. But two partners do not a finance practice make, and Eisenberg opened the purse again a few years later.
In 2009, the firm hired five new finance partners from across the City: structured and real estate finance duo Jayne Black and Eleanor Hunwicks joined from Katten Muchin Rosenman Cornish; banking partner Richard Hughes from Sidley Austin; asset finance partner Russell Clifford from A&O; and leveraged finance partner Andrew Bamber, also from A&O.
In something the PR machine at the firm is keen to downplay, it is widely acknowledged that most of the new recruits came in on individual guaranteed packages worth up to £800,000.
Management, including former finance chief Simon Allan, negotiated the contracts and the arrivals of the new recruits but something the firm had not budgeted for was the response from existing partners when the downturn took its toll and profits plummeted.
‘It was all going fine until the downturn hit and those pay deals came out of the partner profits,’ comments one source close to the firm. ‘There were [partners] who were bringing in a decent amount of work but saw their share fall off because they weren’t on guaranteed deals.’
During the 2008/09 financial year, when law firms across the country most felt the pain of the recession, BLP’s profit per equity partner (PEP) fell by 34% from £620,000 to £407,000, marking the biggest drop the firm had seen since the merger. This is where the problems started to surface. For partners like Box and Severs, it meant their drawings had fallen substantially, despite bringing in a healthy flow of Lehman Brothers-related work and a number of restructuring mandates.
Unrest was growing among the partners within the finance practice – partly because of pay and partly because of what was labelled by former partners as complacency to expand past borrower-side work. However, the catalyst for the most recent spate of departures from the firm was the decision to move the highly lucrative real estate finance practice to sit within the real estate group.
Partners like former real estate finance chief Mark Waghorn became increasingly disgruntled with not only the firm’s strategy of paying for big name hires but a raft of other decisions made by management, without consultation, which resulted in significant change.
Waghorn’s departure from the firm after 21 years left many partners shocked. The fact that he was taking four partners (real estate finance partner Simon Kildahl, Hughes, acquisition finance partner Jonathan Hayward and former managing partner Robert Jones) with him to rivals Simmons & Simmons left the market questioning the direction of the firm’s finance group.
‘Mark Waghorn is a high-profile name and one of the few people you’d want to have in your firm,’ suggests a City finance partner. ‘The problem was the guaranteed packages some of these guys [at BLP] were on. If they’d been on a profit-sharing scheme, things wouldn’t be so tense.’
Newly appointed finance chief Matthew Kellett, who joined BLP from The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) at the start of 2010, defends the firm’s decision to relocate the real estate finance group and says: ‘We co-located the [real estate finance] team and that move put it next to real estate. It may pay dividends – we thought that we’d get more synergies [with the real estate practice] this way.’ He took over the finance practice in September last year, replacing Allan who was sent to the firm’s Moscow outpost.
Kellett insists he isn’t worried about the team departure and says he wants to focus on what’s important, restructuring the group to focus on the areas that are the most profitable, including asset finance, banking, debt capital markets and project finance.
In February this year, Kellett launched a review of the practice after holding an offsite meeting with finance partners at The Hurlingham Club in Fulham. What was to come out of that meeting he says was the desire, by partners, to focus on improving the firm’s market reputation, its client list and its profitability.
‘As a business guy, I took over the job and decided to review the firm’s finance business. I spoke with partners, looked at the numbers and looked at what made sense,’ explains Kellett. ‘There were certain streams of revenue that weren’t profitable.’
This includes low-level asset financing and corporate lending work. ‘I want a balanced practice and I don’t want to just focus solely on the borrower or lender side. I want to have good established institutional relationships on both sides,’ says Kellett.
BLP currently sits on eight bank panels, including HSBC, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Lloyds Banking Group, RBS, Santander and Barclays. While it doesn’t have a top spot as a main commercial adviser to the latter, it does maintain a position on the commercial and IP, corporate recovery, fiduciary, lending and finance, and commercial real estate sub-panels for the bank.
Kellett says it’s a good time for the firm to establish itself as a serious player in the finance market because of its increased capabilities and because the banks are now receptive to brands they haven’t tried before.
BLP won a role acting for RBS on the bank’s divestment of £16bn worth of non-core property loans. The firm won the leading role on the sale, dubbed ‘Project Isobel’, after a competitive tender in 2011 and continues to advise on it. Kellett says the firm developed the innovative structure by which the bank could sell the loans.
Certainly BLP will need to make a lot of friends outside of real estate to genuinely get a strong footing in the finance world, something that other practice areas could also benefit from. But the question remains: did the firm come to the party too late?
Every single partner interviewed for this feature lists Thames Water, National Grid, Balfour Beatty and Tesco as the firm’s top clients. But Tesco is the most important to both the firm’s corporate and real estate practices. Tesco accounts for 20% of the fees generated by the corporate practice and LB understands it to be one of the reasons BLP branched out into Hong Kong this year. In the firm’s real estate practice as many as seven partners look after the account, while a large chunk of corporate partners dedicate most of their time to it.
Although the corporate group has done well to service the food giant, the strength of the corporate practice within the firm has wavered throughout the decade. In the 2000/01 financial year, corporate made up 32% of the firm’s £87.4m turnover. That figure is now 31% of the firm’s 2010/11 billings.
But BLP’s corporate finance practice, led by legacy Paisner partner David Collins, had a boom year. The group posted revenue growth of more than 20% for 2010/11. Collins says the group has benefited from the strengthening of relationships with board members and general counsel at their corporate clients during the downturn.
The firm’s private equity and M&A offerings, however, still need some work. While the firm hired private equity big name Raymond McKeeve in 2009 to help develop the firm’s practice, corporate chief John Bennett admits that the practice is still a work in progress.
The problem facing BLP is that while McKeeve was certainly a high-profile private equity hire, even those firms which invested heavily in private equity partners before the boom years of 2005 to 2007 are having a hard time securing the few mandates that exist. BLP may have missed the boat again.
Information provided by mergermarket shows that BLP advised on just 268 M&A deals between 2005 and 2010. Compared with immediate rivals SJ Berwin, which advised on 467 deals during the same period, BLP’s impression on the corporate world looks lacklustre (see graph, ‘Berwin Leighton Paisner M&A activity trend’, page 28).
However, the 2010 addition of Alexander Keepin from Charles Russell has seen the firm land some pretty chunky mining deals, including taking a role advising energy and coal group PT Bumi Resources on its $2bn sale of 75% of its minerals business to Vallar.
Bennett defends the practice and says that it’s growing internationally. ‘There is no danger of complacency here. We see ourselves like that – we’re a growth firm with exciting times ahead,’ he muses.
If there is one thing that BLP cannot be charged with, it’s having a lack of ambition. But this is yet to manifest itself in terms of international expansion, where the firm is again behind the curve. The firm is set to open offices in Frankfurt and Berlin before the end of 2011 after hiring four German partners from Linklaters. That this German launch comes at least ten years behind most of its City rivals speaks volumes about the pace of its international ambitions.
International expansion
BLP was slow off the block with its international strategy, waiting until 2007 to open outside of Europe. The firm now has two relatively small offices in Singapore and Abu Dhabi and earlier this year announced a new outpost in Hong Kong.
The exception to these rather timid forays into international waters is the firm’s Moscow launch.
In a surprise move in 2009 the firm teamed up with name partner Andrey Goltsblat of Russia’s biggest law firm, Pepeliaev, Goltsblat & Partners. Goltsblat brought across a team of around 70 lawyers to BLP, gifting the firm a ready-made and full-service practice in Russia. The merged entity sits beneath BLP’s limited liability partnership structure and is part of the same unified profit pool. However Goltsblat, who runs the Russian business, stresses the autonomy of the office: ‘BLP is a partner that gives us flexibility and freedom. I doubt that would have happened at another firm.’
In 2010/11, its first full financial year since joining, the Moscow arm generated revenues of £15.3m for the wider firm. But the success in Russia aside, the international piece of the puzzle remains surprisingly small for the firm as a whole.
Up until the addition of a five-lawyer team in May 2011 from Holman Fenwick Willan (which included current Singapore managing partner Alistair Duffield), BLP only had two partners on the ground in Singapore. Having doubled its size from its 2007 launch in the Asian city, things could be looking up.
“BLP is a partner that gives us flexibility and freedom. I doubt that would have happened at another firm.”
Andrey Goltsblat, Goltsblat BLP
However, timing hasn’t been everything. The firm opened its Abu Dhabi office at the start of 2009, just as the Middle East property bubble burst, and while the firm has focused on hotel work in the region, the struggling markets have meant the office has yet to make any real impact to the top line.
Income from the firm’s international offices accounts for just £17m or under 8% of the firm’s global revenue for 2010/11. Compare that to SJ Berwin, where 32% of the firm’s revenue is from international offices; Simmons & Simmons, which sees 41% of turnover come from outside of London; and CMS Cameron McKenna, which derives 26% of billings from overseas.
On those comparisons, the firm still has a way to go. Although the hires in Singapore and the new Hong Kong office may go some way to addressing that.
For the moment, the firm seems intent on cracking Asian markets. ‘Our Hong Kong office is a work in progress and there is a lot to be done,’ says Eisenberg. ‘We see it as a gateway to the Chinese market. I would be surprised if that didn’t lead to us having a presence in the People’s Republic of China but we haven’t taken a decision on that yet.’
But the Asia market is as competitive now as it has ever been. Firms three times the size of BLP that have had offices in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia for decades, are themselves having a hard time recruiting due to an already oversaturated market. Again, eyeing up Hong Kong ‘as a gateway to the Chinese market’ is something that should have been on the firm’s agenda long before now.
Asia aside, the US is an obvious move for any ambitious firm. Eisenberg doesn’t rule this out but says that it’s not on the cards any time soon. ‘We don’t have a lot of Americans knocking on our door, but we have had a few approaches over the years. However, it’s not part of our plan for the medium term to merge with an American firm. Certainly we wouldn’t exclude it as a possibility for the longer term.’
But whether BLP would be attractive to a US firm is less clear. When SJ Berwin’s merger talks with Proskauer Rose fell apart in 2010, one of the main sticking points was SJ Berwin’s reliance on the domestic real estate market and lack of international footprint. BLP faces a similar scenario. But its financials give it a strong footing in the market, which could bode well for the firm if it ever wanted to add the US piece.
THE INNER CIRCLE
BLP managing partner Neville Eisenberg runs a tight ship. He makes the top strategic decisions at the firm, which he channels through a group of 14 department heads and directors. The biggest decisions are made through this core group of partners, sometimes outside of traditional board meetings.
But this executive policy making has been criticised by former partners, who claim that decisions are often made by this inner circle of partners without a wider consultation of the partnership.
‘Neville was hard to get face to face time with. He would delegate to his fiefdom of department heads, who would then delegate down to the partnership,’ complains an ex-partner.
‘I met with partners regularly [through the recession] and I don’t believe there was a lot of unhappiness. Yes, people had questions but we were facing a major recession and people wanted to understand how we were going to deal with it. Was there unhappiness? No, I think there was concern,’ defends Eisenberg.
Eisenberg says that management does consult widely but concedes that he often works outside of official board meetings.
‘I often bounce a few ideas off one or more of the board members outside of meetings,’ he says. ‘The thing is if one tries to achieve total consensus in a law firm you will never get anything done, it’s impossible. So the objective should be to achieve sufficient consensus and the decision on what is sufficient changes depending on the project.’
The ‘Neville club’ includes departmental heads such as Robert MacGregor (real estate), John Bennett (corporate), Matthew Kellett (finance), Jonathan Sacher (litigation) and Michael Wistow (tax) and the firm’s directors.
Former partners say this has meant that the collegiality within the firm has disappeared as the cliques have taken hold. Back in 1999 when LB last profiled Berwin Leighton, collegiality was very much a key buzzword within the firm. But partners are keen to ensure there is still a friendly nature about the BLP offices, with one litigation partner claiming that joining was ‘the best decision’ he ever made. ‘BLP is very collegiate and very open,’ says recent hire Alexander Keepin, while corporate finance head David Collins agrees and says the partnership is like an ‘open book’.
Number crunching
There is no doubt that BLP has done well to build its finances. In the decade since its formation, the firm’s fee income has increased by 152%, which is impressive given the firm endured two recessions and a heavily depressed real estate market.
The firm’s growth through the years after the merger has been steady. With the exception of the recessionary years of 2001 and 2008, revenue increased almost every year.
Although he laughs about it now, Eisenberg recalls feeling nervous about the condition of the markets in the year the merger went live.
‘If I was nervous before [the merger happened] you can imagine how I was during the year after,’ he says. ‘There was the downturn in 2001 and the added distraction of the merger had an impact.’
During that financial year, revenue came to £87.4m, while PEP was just £329,000. The year after, billings fell to £86.2m and profits were 22% down to £256,000.
‘We had really got our act together in terms of what we wanted to achieve,’ recalls Eisenberg of the period after the 2001 recession. ‘So while we had a dip, we came out of the downturn much stronger and far more rapidly than other firms.’
To suggest that Eisenberg has ever rested on his laurels as managing partner would be an inaccurate portrayal of a man who is universally acknowledged as an effective leader. BLP is not a firm that sits back and licks its wounds when times are tough.
As the decade pushed on BLP’s numbers looked better every year. 2005/06 saw revenue rise by 20% to £145m from £121m, and during the 2007 property boom BLP’s billings peaked at £185m.
“The merger was a huge success. The industry has been littered with failed mergers and no one can argue that ours wasn’t a success.”
John Bennett, BLP.
But, with the property crash, bank lending grounding to a halt and little to no corporate activity, BLP, like its peers, took a massive hit.
‘The whole City was facing an abyss,’ recalls Bennett, who says the firm remained level-headed about the reality of the markets.
Partners at the firm felt the cold reality of the recession and during 2008/09 took home 34% less than they had the previous year. With the spate of big pay packages signed off by management in the years leading up to and even during the recessionary years, hanging in the air like the Sword of Damocles, noses were put out of joint and BLP lost some of that famous collegiality.
BLP isn’t quite like rival SJ Berwin, whose feast and famine financial performance means that management takes drastic measures and often upsets partners in the process. BLP makes much more calculated decisions.
Eisenberg had to sign off on a redundancy campaign in 2009, which saw 85 job losses in London, while a number of partners were de-equitised.
And in the years leading to that point, significant unrest bubbled up among the firm’s junior equity partners, commonly referred to within the firm as ‘JEPs’. As fixed-share partners, they watched their path to the senior equity scuppered by the number of big name hires to come through the doors. The firm vehemently denies this ever happened and maintains that JEPs were never disgruntled. But in late 2007 a group of 12 JEPs allegedly banded together to confront Eisenberg about their ‘raw deal’. BLP’s equity was a mess.
Partners and former partners recall the firm’s senior equity profits sliding down so much that those sitting at the bottom of the two-tier system made less than the fixed-share partners at the top of the junior equity rung.
Fastforward to present day and the numbers are impressive. Fee income grew 16% to £221m from £191m in 2009/10. The firm’s PEP skyrocketed by 50% to £694,000, one of the highest increases of all LB100 firms this year. Eisenberg says the firm’s success boils down to the investment it made in the years when others were cutting back.
BLP has also moved to rejig its remuneration structure so that the equity is ‘broadened out with a wider spread’ according to one partner (see box, ‘All about the money’, page 29). The creation of a bonus pool, which will reward individuals for overall contribution to the firm and client development, will likely make partners feel happier. But the firm has not ditched its open purse policy for lateral hires.
‘We’ve done a lot of work and made some significant hires. There is a high level of communication with the partners and we continue to focus on what we need to do internationally,’ says Kellett.
BLP’s ‘hunker down’ mentality has served the firm well coming out of the global financial crisis. The firm’s strategy over the next five years, to bolster its market position by differentiating itself from other law firms, could be a step in the right direction.
Much of that boils down to Eisenberg. Every partner interviewed for this feature acknowledges his managerial skills as a reason for the firm’s success.
‘He is an exceptional manager,’ says MacGregor. ‘He is good at moving the whole firm forward but with a light touch.’
Teenage kicks
BLP will look very different come its 20th birthday. It will be bigger, perhaps because of a tie-up to a US firm or through the acquisition of teams from other firms.
‘We are very much a global player now,’ says Bennett. ‘We have strong leadership.’
But whether the strong leader, who has been at the top of the business for more than a decade, will stay in his role remains to be seen. With Eisenberg’s term coming to an end next April, he has a lot of thinking to do. And when questioned whether they think he’ll stand again, BLP partners wouldn’t touch the question with a barge pole. Feelings are, however, scattered among market peers.
“It’s not part of our plan for the medium term to merge with an American firm. We wouldn’t exclude it as a possibility for the longer term.”
Neville Eisenberg, BLP
‘He’ll stay on. He took them through some really rough days and he still fronts up a lot of client relationships,’ points out one commentator outside of the firm.
Another says: ‘He’s been in that position for a long time and although he’s been very inspirational, one would be watching out for the next in line.’
One strong contender is MacGregor, with some suggesting that he’s already ‘being groomed to take over the top spot’. MacGregor’s role within BLP is a powerful one but not one that is solely his own. Wistow also shares this seniority.
But it’s clear that anyone who does attempt to run for managing partner at BLP will have incredibly big shoes to fill. While the firm has its issues to solve as it faces its awkward teenage years, there’s no question that the first ten years of its life have been largely successful. LB