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Revolving doors: Morrison & Foerster makes City move as Fieldfisher and Reed Smith develop international practices

US player Morrison & Foerster emerged as the only firm to make a significant lateral hire in the City last week, while Fieldfisher bolstered its new Luxembourg office and Reed Smith made a triple hire in the Middle East at the expense of Pinsent Masons.

MoFo strengthened its London finance practice with the hire of Benoit Lavigne from Ropes & Gray where he was a partner, focusing primarily on leveraged finance, acquisition finance and special situations lending. The hire is MoFo’s third London office hire of 2018, as the firm strengthened with additions from Clifford Chance and Jones Day earlier this year. Continue reading “Revolving doors: Morrison & Foerster makes City move as Fieldfisher and Reed Smith develop international practices”

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Restructuring star Sum makes quick exit from Sidley’s City practice to join Latham

Yen Sum

Latham & Watkins has hired former Linklaters restructuring star Yen Sum just over a year after she joined Sidley Austin in one of the quickest turnarounds in London’s senior lateral recruitment market.

Sum is joining Latham alongside fellow finance partner Jennifer Brennan, another Linklaters alumni who had also followed her from the Magic Circle firm to Sidley just last year. Continue reading “Restructuring star Sum makes quick exit from Sidley’s City practice to join Latham”

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Big deals – meet the GCs running the headline deals

Shaking hands over briefcase

The global M&A market is booming. Bill Mordan, general counsel at FTSE 100 drug-maker Shire, would know. Shire’s board recently recommended a £46bn takeover offer from rival Japanese pharma giant Takeda.

‘Money continues to be cheap to borrow and so it’s still easy to get funding from venture capital, as well as other speciality equity investments in new technologies,’ Mordan comments. ‘There’s a large quantum of assets out there available for acquisition.’ Continue reading “Big deals – meet the GCs running the headline deals”

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Scotland: All our yesterdays

Partially covered Scottish flag

Change always creates opportunities,’ says Nick Scott, the new managing partner at Brodies, when asked about this year’s departure of predecessor Bill Drummond. But he then quickly adopts a more cautious tone: ‘There will be no radical change to the way we will run our business.’

Scott’s reticence to herald a new era with a major pivot reflects the predicament of a leader inheriting a 20-year legacy of success. Drummond presided over a striking 122% revenue growth between 2007 and 2017, ending with a slow (by Brodies’ standards) 2% increase for the financial year 2016/17, with turnover up to £66.7m, while profit per equity partner (PEP) dropped 2% from £597,000 to £585,000. Continue reading “Scotland: All our yesterdays”

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Going places: focus on Michelin

Michelin tyre

Leading a global legal team is a complex role and many general counsel (GCs) could be forgiven for spending all their energy just trying to get the job done. Not so at Michelin. Despite overseeing a legal community of 200 members, comprising lawyers, patent engineers, paralegals and admin staff, spread across 20 countries, group GC Benoit Balmary wanted the team to develop a defined strategy of its own alongside supporting Michelin’s goals.

‘We have the global management team, the management team of the legal function worldwide, which I chair. This is composed of all of the general counsel of the regional teams, and the heads of the biggest domain teams (IP and corporate), and the head of ethics. This team meets every semester and together we set the strategy of the legal department for the coming years,’ notes Balmary. The mission of the legal department, as defined by our management team, is ‘to protect the group against legal risks and to facilitate its business objectives in an efficient, innovative and sustainable way’. Continue reading “Going places: focus on Michelin”

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Disruptive tech: Riding Schumpeter’s gale

Interrupted screenshot of City

Storyteller. Ninja. Scrum Master. Brand Champion. Evangelist. The modern commercial world has created many new genres of work, but sometimes it is hard to know what they mean. As the London School of Economics’ headline-grabbing anthropologist David Graeber once wrote: ‘It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.’

But, argues Nathan Furr, professor of strategy and innovation at INSEAD in Paris, the phenomenon of ‘bullshit jobs’, as they are increasingly derided in popular culture, is not a simple tale of corporate indulgence, but one of confusion and insecurity afflicting some of the world’s most established businesses. ‘A lot of chief executives are wrestling with a very basic question: what do we do? It just isn’t that obvious what many established businesses’ core activities are anymore. The knock-on effect of this uncertainty is a large amount of internal reorganisation and new roles to “deliver end-to-end customer journeys” and “communicate across silos”. The senior executives I work with are wrestling with the question of how they can respond to the challenge of disruption and continue working profitably.’ Continue reading “Disruptive tech: Riding Schumpeter’s gale”

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Global 100 Overview: They might be giants

Big Law - $100bn and rising

It has been a dramatic year for the world’s top 100 law firms in three respects. Our prediction that the group would break the $100bn barrier by the end of 2016 did not quite happen in last year’s report, but that barrier has been smashed a year later with total revenue for these firms rising 6% to reach $104.42bn. The indomitable US disruptors Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins ramped up growth substantially to make this the year of the $3bn law firm. Lastly, Kirkland hiked revenue by more than $500m to surpass Latham with a 19% surge to $3.165bn.

Two years on from events that threatened to destabilise the global economy – the UK’s shock vote for Brexit and Trump’s election as the leader of the free world – the harbingers of doom appear to have been wrong. While no self-respecting lawyer would admit to a lull in activity, the figures speak to a market that has not only withstood turbulence but flourished. Overall, it was one of the stronger underlying performances in the elite group since the banking crisis thanks to active deal markets and a robust global economy. Continue reading “Global 100 Overview: They might be giants”

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Global 100: Wrecking ball – Inside Kirkland & Ellis’ creative destruction

Kirkland & Ellis wrecking ball

They said rapid growth is hard if you are already big. Last year it hiked revenue 19% from $2.65bn. They said profitability is about focusing on quality over growth. As it became the highest grossing law firm in the world, fee-earner headcount surged 13.5% to over 2,000 and profit per equity partner (PEP) was up nearly 15% to $4.7m. They said a sprawling international footprint is essential if you want to secure high-end mandates. It has just 14 offices – only five outside the US – and generated $3.165bn in 2017. They said global law firms need bank clients. It is famously dismissive of banks and their onerous panels.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Kirkland & Ellis’ meteoric rise over the last decade is how it turned BigLaw’s playbook on its head. The Chicago-bred giant has not only outperformed the profession’s elites in London and New York but challenged the very assumptions underpinning the legal industry’s decades-spanning pecking order. Continue reading “Global 100: Wrecking ball – Inside Kirkland & Ellis’ creative destruction”

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Global 100 ten-year view: Bad timing

Figueroa Street, LA

In the last boom year in 2008 before the global financial crisis took its toll, the picture was rosy for UK-bred law firms. Riding high on an exchange rate that was more than two dollars to the pound, Clifford Chance (CC) topped the table with revenues of nearly $2.7bn, heading a list of seven $2bn+ firms, of which four were Magic Circle and another, DLA Piper, the result of a headline-grabbing UK/US tie-up.

Buoyed by their own success, the messages from the City elite were naturally upbeat. Not least because those firms felt that with the globalisation of legal services in full swing and the focus of clients shifting away from New York and towards markets like China and India, their attractiveness to US suitors had never been greater. ‘We want to be the number one global law firm and, without a strong US component, we won’t achieve that,’ said Linklaters’ then firm-wide managing partner Simon Davies. Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer’s chief executive at the time, Ted Burke, echoed the point: ‘We’ve never seen so much interest in us from New York firms.’ Continue reading “Global 100 ten-year view: Bad timing”

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Global 100 Asia Focus: Long-term greedy

Asia skyline with dragon

The clichéd view of the Asia legal market is that it is a very difficult place for international firms to make money. Recent economic underperformance in China has not helped, although the flurry of office openings, hires and deals in the region over the last 12 months would suggest otherwise. Local alliances are the current vogue in China, with the likes of Linklaters and Ashurst opting for these often-complex arrangements.

But while the Asia region is dominated by China, based on recent activity it would seem the so-called secondary markets, like Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Indonesia, could be lucrative areas of interest. As Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) Greater China managing partner May Tai notes: ‘China remains the driver of growth and the story of our careers. However, activity in South-East Asia is just as busy, from the developed markets of Singapore and Malaysia to rapidly emerging markets, such as Laos and Cambodia.’ Continue reading “Global 100 Asia Focus: Long-term greedy”

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The New GC Toolkit: Hired help – bringing new skills to legal teams

staff running a business

‘A good general counsel (GC) should do three things,’ says National Grid’s Alison Kay: ‘Manage the legal requirements of the business, manage their people and manage their budget.’ But as managing the legal requirements of a large business becomes more time consuming, GCs are increasingly finding it difficult to pay adequate attention to costs and staff.

‘In-house is fighting constantly for staffing and budget against compliance, enterprise risk and other areas, and teams are stretched thin just responding to demand,’ says Leigh Dance, founder and president of ELD International. ‘The GC’s time is taken by dealing with board-level issues and often there is no second tier of in-house professionals with the time or experience to implement new technology or make the case for legal operations support.’ Continue reading “The New GC Toolkit: Hired help – bringing new skills to legal teams”

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The New GC Toolkit: The innovation illusion

Stéphanie Hamon

‘There’s a palpable sense of innovation in the legal industry,’ says Casey Flaherty, founder of legal technology consultancy Procertas. ‘But then,’ he adds, ‘there always has been.’

While heads of innovation are now an established part of the law firm landscape – among the better-known names in this rapidly expanding sub-profession of business development are Derek Southall of Gowling WLG, Bas Boris Visser of Clifford Chance, Kathryn DeBord of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner and Knut-Magnar Aanestad of Norwegian firm Kluge – their impact on the practice of law is more muted. Continue reading “The New GC Toolkit: The innovation illusion”