I’m the only one in my immediate family who isn’t a scientist – they’re all biologists and engineers. My grandfather, though, was a lawyer in a small market town in Fife so I’d always been interested in law as a career. He was a traditional high street lawyer – doing very little corporate work – …
In the contest for the biggest legal story of the moment, the A&O Shearman merger may be more transformational for the firms involved, but it is fair to say it has not quite captured the imagination like Paul Weiss’s dramatic and audacious hiring spree in London. ‘The question is whether a firm can genuinely build …
Continue reading “Market forces: Paul Weiss, Kirkland and the war for London talent”
Clandestine conversations, a recruitment strategy on steroids, eye-watering salaries and internal politics galore, the Paul Weiss/Kirkland story has enough drama in it to keep the attention of even those outside the legal market. For City partners, the interest in what’s going on has been off the scale.
Welcome to the 2024 Life Sciences Yearbook from the Legal 500 and Legal Business, sponsored by Herbert Smith Freehills. This yearly publication will offer insight into the issues facing life sciences companies in the wake of Brexit, as well as interviews with leading private practice lawyers in the sector and a data-driven snapshot of the …
Continue reading “Life Sciences Yearbook 2024 – Editor’s letter”
Welcome to the first-ever Employment Yearbook from The Legal 500 and Legal Business. This annual publication aims to provide a one-stop shop of interviews, insights, legal developments and data, looking at everything on the agenda for employment advisers and their clients.
A global pandemic, the war in Ukraine, soaring energy prices and inflation, as well as interest rate hikes significantly pushing up the cost of debt – it is no wonder M&A markets are struggling right now. Against this backdrop of instability, arguably the bigger questions are how activity levels managed to hold up for as …
Continue reading “M&A veterans: Got the T-shirt – M&A Hall of Famers on closing deals in a crisis”
Karen Davies – Ashurst London corporate partner and global chair Why did you decide to become an M&A lawyer? It was law or medicine, and halfway through my science A-Levels I realised that reasoning and debate was where my passion lay. I’ve never regretted it. I was initially drawn to M&A by the buzz of …
Talking about diversity in law is hard. While there has been widespread progress when it comes to driving up the number of women in law, it is clear there is still much to be achieved with regards to other underrepresented groups. It is a particularly challenging task given both the scarcity of useful data and …
Continue reading “Success or failure? The push for gender equality is no longer a binary matter”
UK editors Georgina Stanley (pictured) and Ben Wheway take a deep dive into the performance of the Legal Business 100 firms in the most recent UK Legal 500 research Spotting trends across research as vast and wide-ranging as The Legal 500 UK Solicitors isn’t always straightforward. The research by Legal Business’s sibling title is unique …
‘Sitting on your computer in your bedroom all day isn’t culturally enriching. When we see how our junior lawyers operate now, you can tell they’ve been trained during the pandemic. They’ve missed out on the day-to-day, hearing the titbits of conversations, the lift discussions, the conversations on the way to and from meetings,’ laments Slaughter …
Continue reading “Face value – mentoring in the hybrid work era”
