Whether it is the prospect of another few weeks still left of winter, many law firm leaders seem to have started the year under an uncharacteristic cloud of despondency.
Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to work out the other reasons why even the peppiest of senior partners might appear noticeably dispirited. The US contingent at least will be frantically number-crunching ahead of financial results coming out and, after the year that most transactional practices have had, the task will be about as enviable as filling out your tax returns. That said, early indications of double-digit growth from Milbank and Hogan Lovells may well prove those fears unfounded.
Then there is the political upheaval posed by 2024 being the year of the US presidential election and the UK general election (one London managing partner imparts the fun fact that this is the first time the two have coincided in the same year since the 1960s). And these are only the scheduled disruptions that we know about.
In truth, there is more unpredictability in the world now than ever before, so it’s little wonder that lawyers, such risk-averse creatures of order and routine, are paralysed by all the unknowns these days.
Speaking of the unexpected, Linklaters’ surprise investment in a six-strong New York M&A team in January from Shearman & Sterling has got the market chattering, and gone some way to dispel fears of a slow start to the year for legal hacks (the old adage of no news is good news is not true for us).
Indeed, the hire of George Casey, Shearman’s global managing partner and Legal 500 Hall of Famer for $1bn+ megadeals, is a huge coup for Links and its management team, which will no doubt have used it as a golden opportunity to proverbially stick two fingers up at the many detractors who derided Linklaters for having no US strategy to speak of. It will also be a fillip for a firm that ended 2023 somewhat beleaguered after a string of high-profile partner exits, especially to the irresistible lure of Paul Weiss’ high-rolling recruitment drive around the Square Mile.
While some critics question Casey’s recent deal history (and it is true that the firm’s press release trumpets no deals after 2022) amid a no-doubt time-consuming management job, this is still a marquee acquisition in the truest sense of the word.
As one London managing partner puts it: ‘George Casey is quite famous – everybody knows him. When you think of Shearman, you think of George. He is Shearman’s main M&A man so it will be a big loss for Allen & Overy.’
Of course, while the management of A&O will have expected some fallout from executing such a notoriously difficult thing as a law firm takeover, losing one of the target company’s most lucrative assets must have been a bitter pill to have to swallow. And, whoever it was at A&O who thought they could divert the attention away from the unfortunate event with news of the merged firm’s office arrangements and its ‘rapidly advancing’ integration, sadly failed.
How is any of this supposed to help cheer you up? Bear with me a bit longer. An influential partner whose elite firm has so far avoided being ravaged by Paul Weiss in London noted over lunch recently: ‘There has been a lot of schadenfreude over Paul Weiss hiring all those people from Kirkland, which has for so long been the bane of our lives. That is a dangerous attitude.’ That partner worded it a lot more elegantly than I, but the crux of the message was ‘there but for the grace of God go I’.
And that’s exactly the point. There has not been this level of disruption in recent years since Kirkland’s rampage. Now Paul Weiss is winning the awards for most creative destructor and even Linklaters is giving it a go. Managing partners beware – what’s happening now is only the tip of the iceberg. But the good news is, that fear will be great at giving the market back that hustling energy people had in the ‘90s when they had the desire to build business and make it big. There is no time to indulge in the winter blues.