The Last Word – Reflections and looking ahead

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Senior figures provide personal perspectives on a changing industry for our 250th edition

Working with Salz

‘I worked for Anthony as an associate. In order of descending seniority, Phil Richards, me and Will Lawes were his “bag carriers”. It was an exciting time. During the 1980s our M&A team were the new kids on the block and the firm was undergoing a reputational transition from a traditional Bank of England adviser to a push-the-envelope transactional adviser. By the 1990s, Freshfields was the go-to firm.

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Join our club – law firms’ obsession with the in crowd is beyond parody

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As I reach my middle years I find much to admire and celebrate about the legal profession, and lawyers in general. This column is not going to be about any of that stuff. Instead, we turn to a facet of the typical lawyer’s character that does them no credit: the obsession with joining a crowd, or rather a club that the lawyer believes says something ego-stroking about them.

Whatever you call a law firm, however factually you try to describe it, that firm will want a different, self-authored tag and often one that stretches credibility. One firm’s comms team has stalked me for years demanding I call a practice that generates less than 15% of its revenue outside the UK, and a good deal of its income from the UK regions, ‘global’. Golden Circle, Silver Circle – when I heard these terms years ago, I figured there was no way they’d catch on. Magic Circle sounds bad enough as it is, but it became currency because it defined a basic truth: as bluechip advisers, five London law firms were in a league of their own by the end of the 1990s. They still are.

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The cost of culture – HSF finds mega-mergers always come at a price

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This month’s cover feature on Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) looks in hindsight like an informal trilogy on storied London firms agreeing high-stakes mergers, following earlier pieces on Hogan Lovells and Ashurst.

Taken together, patterns and contrasts emerge. The legacy Herbert Smith, Lovells and Ashurst were all wrestling with similar cultural and strategic issues ahead of their unions as they struggled to compete against larger and more driven rivals.

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Magic Circle real estate withdrawal isn’t a myth, but it’s not that simple

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In a 2011 piece on the decimated real estate market in the City, we noted that few senior property partners were in their mid-40s, due to the fact that law firms largely ceased hiring junior real estate lawyers following the early ’90s crash. It looks like history will repeat itself in roughly 15 years’ time: post-credit crunch, the most established real estate practices went into hibernation. Some started to disintegrate. Either way, if you were a trainee interested in real estate around 2010, pickings were slim.

But, as we report in ‘Back in the game’ on pages 48-54, real estate is back with a vengeance and some partners would have you believe it never really went away. The most popular line of argument is that there is a wealth of opportunity out there for City and national firms because the Magic Circle has been progressively retrenching in property for years.

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The Last Word – Hot property

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Renewed interest from international investors leading to increased deal flow means real estate practices are back in favour again. We ask leading practitioners about the future of this volatile market

 

Solemn vows

‘We’ve treated real estate like a marriage – in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer. We haven’t reneged on our responsibilities, so when potential new clients talk to existing ones about our relationship, they hear the same thing – that we’re a committed and consistent team that has continued to deliver.’

Leona Ahmed, real estate divisional managing partner, Addleshaw Goddard

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Leadership in law: improving, crucial and maybe in the nick of time

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Strong leadership is fundamental to driving innovation in law firms. This is not a discussion point. There is no discussion. This issue, Legal Business teamed up with Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) for an extended look at the role of leadership in a period of uncertainty and the strength of that core conclusion surprised even me.

While it’s not surprising that law firm leaders hold that view – it would be odd if they didn’t – it was more telling that clients did as well. But the real acid test is the overwhelming endorsement of the need for robust leadership from partners and associates in our research. As this involves partners downplaying their own contribution – which they are neither culturally inclined nor structurally incentivised to do – that’s saying something.

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Never mind the magic, feel the substance

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During its 125th anniversary year, Slaughter and May still divides the industry like no other institution. For its admirers, it is the standard bearer, bucking the received wisdom of the modern legal market – for detractors, an outfit on borrowed time, hoping to bet against the market (with an unhedged bet at that).

But 17 years since it first articulated what became irritatingly known as its best friends strategy, there remains no clear answer as to which camp is right.

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Gang aft agley – relief for Scots lawyers but indy vote is hard on mice an’ men

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It was late in the day, as opinion polls narrowed alarmingly, that English lawyers took notice of Scotland’s independence vote last month and entertained the huge implications of a split in the UK’s 300-year-old union.

As several major Scottish institutions warned they would relocate operations to London, sterling buckled and one mortgage-backed securities deal went so far as to exclude Scots real estate, the implications began to sink in for business.

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The Last Word – The client’s view

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Interviewed for our annual in-house report, general counsel (GCs) at leading companies give us their views on panels, pricing, regulation and diversity

Law across borders

‘We are going to see a lot more cross-border, multinational transactions that involve an in-depth legal scope well beyond the UK Companies Act. In-house lawyers, especially at the GC level, even if they just manage a local UK business, are going to see a lot more cross-border transactions and complexity. In my experience, law firms in the UK, especially in the South East and London, are much more flexible and open about the discussion on alternative billing than firms in New York.’

Bill Mordan, senior vice president and group GC, Reckitt Benckiser

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Converging on boom-time profits without a boom – the big four now and then

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They say averages lie, though in my experience not as much as people, but producing an annual report with 2,000 data points as we do with this month’s LB100 means it can be hard even for professional anoraks such as myself to find the nuggets of meaning in the thickets of information.

Well, when in doubt I start with the market leaders, so I dug up the numbers on London’s big four in their peak of 2008 to compare against this year’s results to see how they have changed. Continue reading “Converging on boom-time profits without a boom – the big four now and then”