General Pinochet, Nick Leeson and Ian Maxwell are all former clients. More recently, Rebekah Brooks and UBS rogue trader Kweku Adoboli have called in Kingsley Napley for help. LB speaks to managing partner Linda Woolley about a firm where the clients make the front pages. The reception area at Kingsley Napley’s offices in Clerkenwell very …
When US outfit Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe entered the London market in 1998, chairman Ralph Baxter had a dream of competing on the global stage. But 13 years on, that dream looks to be souring. LB investigates what is going wrong. Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe was once seen as one of the most successful and …
Energy clients are dictating law firms’ strategic direction and hiring policies. For now at least, energy is king. LB finds out why. On the last day of August ExxonMobil dominated the business pages, when news broke of its $3.2bn Arctic exploration deal with Russian state-owned oil giant Rosneft. The story surprised energy specialists – a …
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 …
With a few years of pain behind them, City 50 firms are feeling better. But is it still too early to bring out the champagne? Previous concerns that London’s place on the global financial stage could be eroded seem to have been forgotten this year. While the UK economy is still in a state of …
LB100 LAW FIRMS The firms that appear in the LB100 are the top 100 firms in the UK, ranked by gross fee income generated over the financial year 2010/11. (Usually 1 May 2010 to 30 April 2011.) We call these the 2011 results.
Scan the figures from this year’s Legal Business 100 survey and it seems that little has changed when it comes to gender diversity in the non-equity and equity partner ranks. Of the 7,376 equity partners across the UK’s 100 largest law firms by revenue, in 2010/11 just 17% of all equity partners are female. Similarly, …
This year we’ve broken the Scottish Big Four up. Most likely to the chagrin of Maclay Murray & Spens and Shepherd and Wedderburn, rival firms McGrigors and Dundas & Wilson have joined the Major UK group by virtue of national coverage, reputation and having revenues of over £60m. While in terms of market share and …
The struggle continues. While the North peer group maintains its position and outperforms other regions, average revenue has grown marginally with the departure of DWF and Hill Dickinson, which have joined the Major UK firms group (see page 94). In last year’s review, these firms were £15m and £21m respectively ahead of the rest of …
The absence of this peer group’s two leading performers, Mills & Reeve and Gateley, has seen averages for the Central region take on a distinctly ‘average’ hue. The region is now officially the worst performing peer group in the LB100 in revenue terms, a wooden spoon that it inherited last year from the South group …
