The last word – strategic recruitment

From disastrous due diligence to delusions of grandeur, leaders from LB100 firms and senior recruitment specialists give their take on making lateral hires work.

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‘Be patient and think long term. Moving firms isn’t easy for anyone. It never works out exactly how you’d planned it and the client market can shift significantly, but if the character fit, quality, strategic fit and business fit were right at the outset, then it should come good in the long term. In the meantime, the profit-sharing system needs the flexibility to accommodate this.  Continue reading “The last word – strategic recruitment”

Heading to The Ivy: Legal Business and RPC team up for GC Power List Summer Reception

We’ve made it no secret that a major aim for Legal Business and its Legalease stablemates is to better engage with the general counsel (GC) community. As such, we’re taking another step in that direction with the launch of an exclusive debate and networking event in June, building on the success of our acclaimed Power List report.

The GC Power List Summer Reception will be held on the evening of 11 June, with RPC as lead sponsor. The event will comprise a relaxed debate chaired by veteran City columnist Anthony Hilton, followed by an evening of food and drink at the renowned private members’ club at The Ivy. The debate will include senior lawyers sharing their experiences from companies including Land Securities, ITV, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Shire and Vodafone.

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Whose money making machine? Not all law firms will be richer in a bank-lite world

Cov-lite, cov-loose and even now cov-lame – in some pockets of the finance market we are back to the boom days. All we need is a couple of headstrong private equity partners to quit Linklaters for a more sponsor-facing platform and we’ll be right back to 2006. On second thoughts…

As our cover feature this month makes clear, the debt markets are going through not only a substantive revival but the non-investment sector is rapidly being dragged towards a US-style dynamic. This means European borrowers increasingly tapping capital markets and the role of banks reducing amid competition from other debt providers. The related vogue for upper mid-market and larger buyouts to be backed by high-yield bonds and US loans has obvious implications for City advisers since it tilts the playing field heavily in favour of New York law and US advisers.

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Shock horror: economic revival makes it as impossible as ever to make partner

It’s not going to come as a huge shock to our readership of jaded veterans to hear this but the 2014 promotion rounds from the UK’s top law firms have confirmed that the striking revival in business confidence over the last 12 months has made pretty much no improvement in partnership prospects.

Yes – my back-of-the-envelope calculations are that the Magic Circle plus Herbert Smith Freehills, Norton Rose Fulbright, Hogan Lovells and Ashurst have added only 193 individuals to the club despite fielding between them partnerships of well over 5,000. The 2014 promotions round at these firms is equivalent on average to less than 4% of their partnerships – well below the replacement rate needed to sustain their ranks.

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DISSENT: A precarious professionalism

UCL’s Richard Moorhead argues the integrity and professionalism that City lawyers take for granted is all too easily swayed

The practice of law has flipped from vocation to business. Law firms and individual lawyers are measured explicitly in predominantly economic terms. Profit per equity partner (PEP) and other indicators trickle down firms through targets and bonuses. Hourly rates are the oil that greases this engine. Alongside that is the somewhat servile claim that lawyers are not deal breakers or pettifoggers, but business-focused advisers, and business-focused advisers for whom the client comes first.

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The last word – the state of law firm leadership

With a spate of executive elections taking place recently, we ask the c-suite at leading City firms how management has changed over the last five years


CONSENSUS APPROACH

‘The command and control structure doesn’t generally work in law firms. Nonetheless, the last five years have seen a greater acceptance from partners for the need to operate more tightly and collectively. Partnerships will always have mixed feelings about their leadership. Leading a law firm is about managing ambiguity, ambivalence and disparate viewpoints.

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‘Geography seduced everyone’ – is emerging market bias blind-siding your firm?

There is a notion in business that is often useful, but rarely observed – the idea of signal and noise, or rather being able to distinguish between the two. The not-remotely-new point I’m making – well illustrated in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s not-remotely-new book, Fooled by Randomness – is that in making informed decisions, leaders should endeavour to shut out the ‘noise’ of short-term, rapidly changing information, which is typically near worthless. Instead they should focus on the longer-term, underlying trend, which can be worth a great deal if you can find it.

Such thoughts occurred while reading a recent piece in The Economist that tackles one of the dominant concepts in business over the last two decades – arguably the dominant idea – that western businesses must focus their growth and investment in key emerging economies. As the article ‘Emerge, splurge, purge’ notes, so prevalent has become this orthodoxy that it has escaped any real debate: ‘Corporate strategy is usually a contentious subject: there are fierce debates about how big, diversified or leveraged firms should be. But geography has seduced everyone.’

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A truly global City and the fiercest contest in law

So much for the humbling of the City. Our annual Global London special finds that the number of lawyers employed at the top 50 foreign firms in the Square Mile has finally and comfortably broken its 2008 high, with over 4,500 lawyers working across the group after a 6% hike in numbers.

And in the post-Lehman world, London is now less about grand schemes and expensive investment – these offices are often profitable in their own right. The top ten largest City offices of US-bred parents collectively generated over £1bn in fees last year and have made 34 lateral hires since last February. Continue reading “A truly global City and the fiercest contest in law”

Democracy and half measures are not delivering for Addleshaws

I wrote recently of the need, when commenting on the firms and individual lawyers we cover, to give the benefit of the doubt, and I meant it, but sometimes it’s hard to find that silver lining or constructive slant. Addleshaw Goddard, unfortunately, has become a case in point.

Recent years have seen materially below-trend financial performance, indications of tension between its City arm and northern offices and an international strategy that looked just too little, too late. Perhaps more damaging has been the uncertain tone that has emanated from Addleshaws about where it sits in the market and wants to go.

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The last word – American hustle

In this month’s Global London special we report on the advances made by US firms in London, particularly in litigation. Senior players in London give their perspective.


GO WEST

‘Although Magic Circle firms have offices in the US, they haven’t penetrated the biggest legal market in the world. Those firms haven’t got past a couple of cities on the East Coast – that doesn’t cut it in the US. There’s a lot of litigation in the US and those firms don’t have the same amount of coverage.’

Craig Shuttleworth, partner, Jones Day

 

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