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Disputes Eye: ‘Draconian’ measures as SFO tackles privilege via the back door

Serious Fraud Office

Despite the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) opting in October not to pursue its much-publicised privilege appeal against ENRC any further, it is taking an increasingly hard-line approach in other ways.

Notably, the agency has come under scrutiny for its heavy-handed use of section 2 notices, an order compelling any individual or business to submit evidence or information. Failing to provide what the SFO wants can be punishable by up to six months’ imprisonment, a fine, or both. Continue reading “Disputes Eye: ‘Draconian’ measures as SFO tackles privilege via the back door”

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Moves that matter

Alun Milford
  • White & Case’s aggressive sweep on the City lateral market continued in October with the hire of Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) infrastructure partner Simon Caridia. Caridia advises on both greenfield and brownfield transactions, and spent nearly a decade at Linklaters before joining HSF in 2015. It constitutes White & Case’s 13th lateral this year alone.

Continue reading “Moves that matter”

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Akin rainmakers quit to launch Russia independent in further apocalyptic sign for Western firms

Moscow

Lawyers have been speaking for months of a tough environment for international firms in sanction-battered Russia, but no event has been as emblematic as the news in September that two of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld’s top Moscow partners have quit to launch an independent firm.

Heavyweight litigator Ilya Rybalkin and corporate veteran Suren Gortsunyan launched Rybalkin, Gortsunyan & Partners (RGP), bringing across 11 other fee-earners from their former shop – now left with just 18 lawyers in Moscow.
While the US sanction regime bars US firms from supporting Kremlin-linked oligarchs, speaking to Legal Business Gortsunyan said Russian companies were becoming increasingly less comfortable with instructing Western advisers. Continue reading “Akin rainmakers quit to launch Russia independent in further apocalyptic sign for Western firms”

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The new El Dorado: Fieldfisher launches in Spain as Latham doubles Madrid team in 12 months

Madrid

Ignored by much of the global elite until a few years ago, Spain is quickly becoming one of the hottest legal markets in continental Europe, with Latham & Watkins more than doubling its headcount in less than a year while UK challenger firm Fieldfisher delivers on its much anticipated launch.

Fieldfisher managing partner Michael Chissick announced on 25 September that the firm had completed a three-year-long search to combine with 60-lawyer firm JAUSAS. Continue reading “The new El Dorado: Fieldfisher launches in Spain as Latham doubles Madrid team in 12 months”

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Deal View: Herbert Smith Freehills’ corporate team – credibility and polish only get you so far up the table

Scott Cochrane

‘It’s like the rivalry between Fulham and Chelsea,’ notes one former Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) partner of his old club’s oft-cited tension between corporate and disputes. ‘Fulham fans think of Chelsea as one of its biggest rivals. Chelsea fans think of Fulham as that nice team down the road.’

No prizes for guessing that it is corporate that represents the plucky underdog in this reading. At a glance, such a comparison seems uncharitable. HSF’s corporate team is ranked in The Legal 500’s second tier for premium M&A deals, alongside Allen & Overy and Clifford Chance; most peers still regard its City corporate team as the best outside the Magic Circle. The legacy Herbert Smith also has a history stretching back to the 19th century as one of London’s prominent corporate solicitors, long before its embryonic disputes team invented the modern City model of running litigation as a substantive business line in the 1970s. Continue reading “Deal View: Herbert Smith Freehills’ corporate team – credibility and polish only get you so far up the table”

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Stars and stripes in their eyes – assessing the US ambitions of A&O and Freshfields

New York fortress at sea

Nathalie Tidman looks at the struggle for the City elite as US players dominate home and away

‘People like me, making the switch from the Magic Circle to a US firm – a Kirkland, a Latham, a White & Case – did so because being a powerhouse in the US is critical to becoming a truly global law firm.’ Continue reading “Stars and stripes in their eyes – assessing the US ambitions of A&O and Freshfields”

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The team in I: The GC Powerlist Summer Reception

GC Powerlist Summer Reception event photos

Nailing the issue of what makes a high-performing in-house function, with the emphasis on operational sophistication, has become the Holy Grail for general counsel (GCs). Following the launch earlier this year of the 2018 GC Powerlist – which highlighted 50 leading in-house teams – we teamed up with headline sponsor Eversheds Sutherland to assemble an audience of more than 70 in-house counsel at The Ned. This featured an informal discussion between our panel of senior lawyers and operations staff working at some of the biggest multinationals. The debate covered the introduction of legal operations specialists, the advance of technology and widening the skills of in-house functions, all geared towards creating more effective and nimble teams.

*** Continue reading “The team in I: The GC Powerlist Summer Reception”

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Special territory: Fintech in Hong Kong

bamboo

‘You have to, to serve these markets, re-imagine how money can be managed and moved, because there’s going to be more change in the next five years in financial services than happened in the past 30.’

Dan Schulman, chief executive, PayPal

Global investment in fintech companies hit an all-time high of US$27.4bn in 2017, an increase of 18% year on year, with the market showing no sign of slowing. Led by China, the fintech revolution has spread across the rest of Asia, while simultaneously gaining traction in the UK, US and Europe. Continue reading “Special territory: Fintech in Hong Kong”

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The Global 100 debate – Will stars or institutions define the law’s elite?

David Higgins et al

Alex Novarese, Legal Business: Ten years ahead, what will a global elite firm look like?

Charlie Jacobs, Linklaters: I don’t think it’s going to go the accountancy way, where you just go bigger and the Big Four dominate. A lot of focus seems to be around profitability and if you are driven by that metric, you get a certain type of firm. When I started, it was the Magic Circle in London and a certain category of US firms. We have seen lots of change. But I don’t see just one model prevailing. Continue reading “The Global 100 debate – Will stars or institutions define the law’s elite?”

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No free lunch – Will law firm IPOs be the next big thing?

Dangling carrot

For years it could, just about, be ignored. But no longer. The UK’s largest practices are being forced to consider a seductive, provocative, explosive question that strikes right to the heart of a law firm and what it means to be a professional: have they considered an initial public offering (IPO)?

By now, of course, at some level they all have, if only to construct a stock (no pun) rebuttal of the case for capital. But despite public dismissal by the leadership of the majority of top-25 UK firms, under the surface there is far more curiosity in this year’s string of legal floats. Continue reading “No free lunch – Will law firm IPOs be the next big thing?”

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The Last Word: The hard path to enlightenment

As part of our autumn tech special, we asked partners, innovation heads and CIOs to give a pragmatic take on the state of law firm tech

Just do it

‘In the next year or two, people will stop talking about AI and just use it. AI will just be embedded in the way firms work – like computers or emails. I don’t think in the long term we’ll have the situation where AI alone gives some firms a sustainable competitive advantage over others.’
Kevin Harris, director of IT, Taylor Wessing Continue reading “The Last Word: The hard path to enlightenment”

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Law firm tech: Turning the lights on

Working in a lightbulb

What do the individuals responsible for putting together the tech behind Lady Gaga’s concerts, a creative executive of ER and the developer of Reuters’ first-ever online financial products have in common? All three reinvented themselves as tech experts at top UK law firms. And you would be forgiven for wondering why on earth someone would make such a move.

‘Law has traditionally not been perceived as the place to find creative and innovative people,’ concedes Andrew Mcmanus, who was IT director at live events business The NEC Group before joining Eversheds in 2014. ‘But I’m not sure that’s the case anymore.’ Continue reading “Law firm tech: Turning the lights on”

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Offshore disputes: Centre of the cyclone

The inferno of disputes arising from the financial crisis is finally being reduced to embers. Although this may have caused the volume of commercial litigation in London to plateau, disputes in the main Caribbean offshore centres continue to be very buoyant: several firms report significant double-digit revenue growth in their dispute resolution teams over the past 12 months.

Driven by different dynamics, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and Bermuda have each developed in their own right as sophisticated jurisdictions in which to litigate – supplemented by the expansion of specialist commercial courts, a raft of high-quality judges and a regular flow of top-drawer London silks to argue significant cases. Continue reading “Offshore disputes: Centre of the cyclone”

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Law firm tech: Tech trumps

working in a lightbulb

Allen & Overy

  • Most senior IT/tech professional: Andrew Brammer, IT and shared services director, reporting to managing partner Andrew Ballheimer
  • Other senior tech personnel: Kevin Oliver, head of advanced delivery; Jonathan Brayne, partner and chair of Fuse; Richard Punt, chief executive of Peerpoint; Marc-Henri Chamay, chief executive of aosphere
  • Size of tech team: 264
  • Main providers and tools: Kira; iManage – document management system; Thomson Reuters Elite – 3E business management system; Intapp – tool for data integration across multiple systems

‘Someone within their PR team must have been given the direction that any press release they issue has to have the word “innovation”,’ quips one partner at a City firm. Yet despite claims that the firm makes more noise than is justified, Allen & Overy (A&O) deserves its reputation of top tech and innovation team among the UK elite.

‘We feel we have given ourselves a competitive advantage on other law firms because we have a proposition that is more mature, so it results in us winning more work of the kind that we want from the clients that we want,’ says Brayne.

As well as a six-year-old, 100-strong legal services centre in Belfast, since 2014 the firm has fielded its 300-strong, flexible interim resourcing business Peerpoint, led by highly rated chief executive Punt.

Meanwhile, incubator Fuse hosts and supports legal tech start-ups. It first selected eight companies out of 84 applicants in September 2017. The second round, in April this year, saw five more established names, including Kira, join three of those from the first cohort. Kira co-founder Noah Waisberg says A&O wanted younger companies to learn from more established ones.

Fully-owned separate company aosphere has developed and sells banks and asset managers online subscription products covering recurring legal and compliance queries in the derivatives and data protection spaces.

Ashurst

  • Most senior IT/tech professional: Noel Jordan, chief technology officer, reporting to Jan Gooze-Zijl, chief financial and operations officer
  • Other senior tech personnel: Mike Polson, director of Ashurst Advance
  • Size of tech team: 160
  • Major technology providers and tools: Kira; iManage – document management system Continue reading “Law firm tech: Tech trumps”
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Disputes tech: A rich market for e-discovery but predictive tools face data hurdle

Paul Baker

 

It is hard to overstate the rise in disputes-focused technology in recent years – a trend underwritten by the dire need to streamline burdensome and expensive disclosure processes.

A major milestone was reached in June, when Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner (BCLP) declared it had become the first firm to win a significant court victory on the back of using document review technology. A notable result, but the real victory came with the cost savings: BCLP partner Oliver Glynn-Jones said that the technology could save as much as a third of the costs of a normal disclosure exercise. Simmons & Simmons litigation partner Ed Crosse added to the hype when he told Legal Business this tech had saved his client somewhere in the region of £2m in a single matter. Continue reading “Disputes tech: A rich market for e-discovery but predictive tools face data hurdle”

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CISOs, clouds and response plans: cyber security in the post-DLA era

Isabel Parker

 

While quick to trumpet their tech capabilities, law firms are coy when it comes to cyber security policies. Making a defence strategy public could play into the hands of hackers, of course. But considering how devastating an attack might be for a law firm and its clients, one would expect at least some publicity of their initiatives on that front.

The issue gained notoriety last summer after a malware attack on a third party compromised DLA Piper’s systems and made the dangers to law firms as collateral damage a reality. Even according to the most conservative estimates, the disruption cost the firm $10m at the very least. But it could have been a lot worse if the attack had led to the disclosure of confidential client information, as with the email hack on Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca & Co (the so-called Panama Papers) and the breach of offshore firm Appleby’s data in 2016 (Paradise Papers). Continue reading “CISOs, clouds and response plans: cyber security in the post-DLA era”

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Legal technology sponsored briefing: Legal IT – standing still is not an option

Peter Owen

 

Legal IT is going through a period of unprecedented change and CIOs need to be leading from the front. Peter Owen of The Intuity Alliance/Lights-On explains

Since the 1990s, IT in legal has been relatively steady and split between volume and traditional legal services, with volume areas consuming most of the technology and time.

Transactional and advisory practice areas have been content with a solid IT platform, thin laptops, smartphones, a strong document management system and a client portal. Litigation adds ‘discovery’ to this if they transact large matters, but in the main, this status quo has been maintained for many years. Today and in the future, all practice groups will be knocking on IT’s door demanding legal tech in order to compete in the age of digital legal services. Continue reading “Legal technology sponsored briefing: Legal IT – standing still is not an option”