The fourth, and largest, Disputes Yearbook returns to find the contentious legal scene much as we left it in 2018. For lawyers offering high-end and upper-midmarket dispute services that remains a good thing, even if there have been busier years post-Lehman. The licence to print money from banking crisis-related work and Russia-inflected conflicts has been revoked for several years now. But the disputes market in the City and across Europe has evolved into far too large and bountiful an ecosystem to be much impacted by such trifles. Arbitration continues to boom, commercial litigation remains solid and robust levels of regulation and enforcement at a global level are producing rich levels of follow-on work.
Meanwhile, white-collar crime and related fields of global investigations have continued their 15-year march into the mainstream of City practice. If once-again mooted reforms to usher in a Bribery Act-style failure-to-prevent offence for general economic crime come to pass – and it’s probably an if rather than a when – such trends will intensify. More recent hot spots include competition disputes – suddenly high up the investment priorities of most large teams – and tax litigation, fired by a more aggressive stance by tax authorities and new powers under the 2017 Criminal Finances Act (see our tax market report). By a similar token, litigators are poised for data-related disputes and follow-on work in the wake of last year’s introduction of the GDPR regime.
As can be seen in our round-table discussion, in common with the rest of the legal profession, debates regarding gender diversity have grown more urgent thanks to painfully slow progress in getting women to senior roles in private practice. Litigators have some cause for optimism amid relative progress; counterparts in arbitration do not.
Viewed globally, London has done well retaining its position even in a period of increasingly fierce competition between the key disputes centres, despite unease among arbitrators about the extraordinary rise of Singapore. Confidence remains high regarding the English judiciary, despite prolonged struggles to fill available roles on the bench. Conversely, less than two years since its launch, the facilities at the much-hyped Rolls Building now attract some gripes as litigators bemoan London courts falling behind the slick infrastructure of rivals. Yet Brexit leaves the profession supremely unconcerned and anticipating a flurry of short-term work, even if the confidence in the long-term contractual popularity of English law looks complacent.
Clouds on the horizon? Continual fretting about costs never does translate into much action. Call me a cynic, but I’m yet to be convinced that the touted disclosure reforms will have much impact. There remains a self-regarding dynamic, built on celebration of judges and judge-made law, that has done much to bolster London’s reputation for bespoke quality but little for pragmatic predictability of our courts. Market forces are having more success in this regard with the proliferation of new players ramping up competition and price pressure in more segments of the market.
The bottom line remains that this is a market that serious law firms have to be seriously represented in. Indeed, the only mystery after the last decade of roaring trade is why contentious lawyers so rarely make the c-suite at elite firms. Too busy presumably.