Ashurst’s management took home £8m in 2016/17, 18% less than the previous year, according to the firm’s recently published LLP accounts.
The City firm’s turnover saw an 12% boost to £541m from £505m the previous year, showing a recovery after two consecutive years of decline following its merger with Australian firm Blake Dawson in 2013. Continue reading “LLP latest: Ashurst management pay drops 18% amid turnover recovery”
‘My career has been a tale of reinvention and creativity.
I have been very lucky in that I have worked on three continents. I started in New York as a corporate finance lawyer in the traditional sense, then transferred to Singapore where younger lawyers did a bit of everything: investment funds, LBOs, JV finance, capital markets. Continue reading “Women deal stars: perspectives – Tamara Box, Reed Smith”
‘Compared to ten years ago, in some ways it’s easier for women and in some it’s more difficult. It is easier because there is a lot of support for gender equality and initiatives to support women. For example, the 30% Club to support them particularly at senior level and at board positions.
Attitudes have changed, we have a lot of policies now around helping many women but also men who want to work in a more agile fashion. This helps women have their career and also a family – but they are also popular with men. Continue reading “Women deal stars: perspectives – Penelope Warne, CMS”
In a blow for traditionalists, our latest cover feature eschews profiling a group of hard-working, smart, highly-confident men who are talented lawyers to instead profile a group of hard-working, smart, variably-confident women who are talented lawyers. Radical stuff.
But then the career cycle for too many ambitious female deal lawyers remains nasty, brutish and short. While women increasingly advance into senior roles in advisory practice areas and even more so among the ranks of senior general counsel, in the upper reaches of transactional law, it is still a boys’ club and anyone claiming differently does not know many corporate lawyers. Continue reading “Comment: Law firms will never just hand status to City women – they’ll have to take it”
Continuing the strong showing from US firms in London recently, Sidley Austin and Morrison & Foerster (MoFo)’s City offices recorded a convincing performance in 2017, each posting double-digit percentage growth in their top line.
Expansive global giant Sidley posted a 14% City revenue hike to £85.7m in a year marked by five headline lateral hires for the firm’s M&A, restructuring and capital markets teams. Continue reading “Global London: Sidley and MoFo City outposts record double-digit revenue growth”
A court in Munich has sentenced a former Linklaters partner to three years and three months in prison for sexual assaulting a student at a firm party several years ago.
Tax partner Thomas Elser assaulted an intern after Linklaters’ Oktoberfest party in September 2014 before a former litigation partner of the firm, Laurenz Schmitt, intervened and punched him in the face. Continue reading “#MeToo spotlight still shines on law as former Linklaters partner jailed for sexual assault”
Revenues at Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft dropped by a striking 10% in 2017 as the firm persists with retrenching in a bid to concentrate its efforts on a more focused client roster.
Global revenue at the Manhattan firm fell for the third consecutive year to $408.1m against a 15% dip in the firm’s lawyer headcount to 373. Continue reading “More bad news for Cadwalader – global revenue dips 10% in 2017 as 10-year slide continues”
Hogan Lovells is the latest firm to venture into flexible lawyering after agreeing a partnership with New Law pioneer Elevate.
The deal announced today (15 February) will give the transatlantic giant access to a pool of 1,500 self-employed professionals worldwide to support its UK business. Elevate will provide a group of pre-vetted lawyers to choose from for specific projects, with Hogan Lovells’ paying Elevate for the cover. Hogan Lovells expects to use between 30 and 50 lawyers from the pool every year and will be looking at four to ten-year qualified lawyers across all practice areas. Continue reading “Let’s be friends – Hogan Lovells hooks up with NewLaw darling Elevate for flexi-lawyer service”
Network Rail has begun its longest-ever panel review process for external adviser work, which could be worth up to £70m over five years from next April.
The rail company’s review will be the first under new group general counsel Stuart Kelly, who was promoted from deputy group GC following the departure of Suzanne Wise in March last year for a non-legal role as senior vice-president for corporate development at Japan Tobacco International . The review will be led by Network Rail route businesses GC Dan Kayne. Continue reading “‘A wonderful opportunity’: Network Rail begins long journey to new £70m adviser panel”
Those of you in the UK with fond memories of the hefty The Legal 500 books dropping onto your desks are in for a change. The publication later this year of the latest research will be environmentally-friendly and move to a wholly digital platform via legal500.com. Our ambition is to create the best possible exposure for law firms’ practices via our online rankings. We want to ensure the most relevant information on law firms and sets is readily available to clients, creating the most comprehensive and user-friendly research service available anywhere online.
Moving The Legal 500 to a digital platform gives legal500.com the flexibility to offer that expanded service. As we seek to improve and expand our published information on the market, we want to work in partnership with law firms and sets, so that our evolving research reflects what you need to convey to clients seeking your firm’s help. Continue reading “Guest post: The Legal 500 United Kingdom is changing – and it starts with the submissions”
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer has enhanced its US antitrust bench with the hire of veteran Eric Mahr from the Department of Justice (DoJ), while White & Case has established its seventh American office in Houston.
Mahr, who joins Freshfields after serving as director of the well-respected antitrust division at the DoJ, has multiple decades’ worth of experience in antitrust litigation, including cartel follow-on litigation and merger disputes. Continue reading “US moves: Freshfields hires DoJ heavyweight while White & Case opens Houston office”
Get your Magic Circle-meets-Geordie Shore quips ready as Clifford Chance (CC) has made a surprise acquisition of Carillion’s pioneering in-house legal arm.
The Newcastle-based business Carillion Advice Services (CAS) was put up for sale following the collapse of its Wolverhampton-headquartered parent in January in one of the largest UK insolvencies for years. Carillion filed for liquidation after talks with its creditors and the government failed to reach a deal on Carillion’s £1.5bn liabilities. Continue reading “CC hits Newcastle for surprise takeover of Carillion’s volume legal arm”
My family moved from London to Essex in the seventies, we bought a big house with a big garden and were going to live off the land. We were basically seen as the village’s hippies – the obvious background for a City lawyer! It went wrong because my dad wasn’t very good at killing chickens, and I became very attached to a duck. He became a teacher to get an income to buy things.
I never decided I wanted to be a lawyer. I studied law because I wanted a fresh start. The school I went to – a large Essex rural comprehensive – did not traditionally produce Oxbridge candidates and I thought: ‘At least everyone is starting from the same place if I do law.’ But even then, I was clearly going to be a footballer, a rock star or a journalist in my head. Continue reading “Life during law: Tom Cassels, Linklaters”
With increasing scrutiny of outside spend, general counsel (GCs) are under mounting pressure to deliver a smooth-running and more efficient machine, as well as effective legal advice. GCs must therefore fine-tune their teams with a discerning eye for quality and economy.
It is a far cry from even ten years ago, when legal heads in the main functioned as a general superintendent of sorts, deploying outside counsel to do much of the work. By 2018, it is becoming increasingly common to see GCs at major plcs running in-house teams similar in scope to top-tier law firms. Continue reading “Precision instruments – the curiously orderly disruption of legal ops teams”
The collapse of film giant Kodak in 2012 is already established to many as the definitive case study of the failure of a business convinced its model would last forever. At its peak, Kodak’s share of the photographic film market was more than 80% in the US and 50% globally. So, when a Kodak employee invented the first digital camera in the 1970s, he was told by the board to keep quiet about it. Denial took hold right up until January 2017 when it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Reborn as a tiny, niche player with a few lucrative patents these days, annual profits for Kodak now are around $12m.
The lesson? Adapt or die. If innovators stop innovating, problems follow. Just ask Nokia and BlackBerry. This, on a much smaller scale, could be an existential crisis that the legal process outsourcing (LPO) industry may have to face. Continue reading “On borrowed time – the GCs looking for answers in a post-LPO age”
It was a prized scalp. In December, Clifford Chance (CC) became the first Magic Circle player to fall foul of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), when the firm and its disputes partner Alex Panayides were each fined £50,000 for their role in the well-documented Excalibur professional negligence saga.
It was a highly-symbolic move. But the £50,000 penalty is small beer relative to CC’s global revenues, and to the fines received by White & Case and Locke Lord in 2017. US firm Locke Lord, with a small City operation, was ordered to pay a record £500,000. Continue reading “Off the leash – as regulators target City leaders, is more to come?”
The train puns were inevitable, but it took longer than expected. Towards the end of my conversation with the general counsel (GC) of online ticket retailer trainline, Neil Murrin, he says: ‘It’s a matter of getting people to join us on that journey.’ And adds: ‘Getting people on the right track and all that.’
Coming from a family of medics, Murrin was intent on avoiding a career in health services. He cites his earliest interest in law as originating from seminal-yet-cheesy drama series L.A. Law, in addition to the influence of his solicitor uncle. He recalls: ‘I’ve always been interested in economics and companies. There was an understanding that law gives you a good training in those areas and could move you towards the company side.’ Continue reading “Client profile: Neil Murrin, trainline”
Nathalie Tidman finds lawyers bemused by crazy pricing and a wall of debt
‘Short of Trump nuking North Korea, I can’t see any immediate problems on the horizon,’ reflects Latham & Watkins partner Christopher Kandel. It is safe to say finance advisers believe the recent bonanza of European leveraged finance activity will continue through 2018 on the back of another record year for the European market. Continue reading “‘Incredibly strong’ – debt counsel gear up for another boom year in leveraged finance”
Global stock markets rose by 22% in 2017, according to the Morgan Stanley Capital International index of bourses. Meanwhile, the World Bank is forecasting global economic growth to increase to 3.1% this year after a better-than-expected 2017 as investment, trade and M&A continue to rebound while commodity prices recover. Against this favourable economic background, it is no surprise that offshore law firms had another very good year.
But there were some local difficulties. Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria created havoc across the Caribbean, not least in the British Virgin Islands (BVI). ‘It had a devastating impact on the lives of our BVI colleagues,’ says Jonathan Rigby, managing partner of Mourant Ozannes. ‘None of us will ever fully understand what they have been through, but their strength of character and resilience has been truly humbling.’ Continue reading “The offshore elite in review – rolling with the punches”
2017 ended with surprising confidence in a rebounding market. Here we ask the City’s leading corporate players for their prognosis on 2018
‘We have come back from the holidays to a whirlwind of deal activity. I’m expecting to see financial investors looking to reduce the competition on deals by pursuing transactions where only a limited number can compete. For example, I expect the large-cap financial investors will look for multibillion-enterprise-value businesses to acquire either on their own or as part of a consortium. Also, financial investors will look to specialise further in certain key sectors so that they can differentiate from their competitors and create that all important auction-winning angle.’
Adrian Maguire, co-head of global financial investors group, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer Continue reading “The last word: Deals or no deals”
