Hamish McNicol looks at the frontrunners amid a bumper season of senior leadership changes
DLA Piper is making up for lost time in its first senior partner election in a decade. The month-long process, which initially involved eight candidates, two voting stages and ten days of hustings, has been heralded by the firm as showing its breadth and depth, but has also raised eyebrows. Continue reading “DLA whittles senior partner race to three-way contest as elections grip the City”
Arbitrators dominate solicitor appointments amid creation of 119 new silks as Latham does double
Red Lion Chambers and Garden Court Chambers saw six and five of their respective barristers take silk in this year’s QC appointments round, while the number of successful solicitors becoming QCs dipped from last year. Continue reading “Latham and SH cheer as latest silk round bountiful for Red Lion and Garden Court”
LB: What have been the big wins for Herbert Smith Freehills [HSF] over the last two years?
Mark Rigotti (MR): It has been the shift from integration. That’s by definition backwards-looking so it’s good to move on. We’ve been strengthening some of the smaller offices. We’re different from the Magic Circle that have long-established European practices. We’ve grown about 50% in five years in mainland Europe. The German, Madrid and Paris offices are all significantly bigger. There are more European clients and more leadership positions going to Europeans. That’s a big cultural shift. Continue reading “Being great at one thing is not enough – remaking a City leader for the times”
Norton Rose Fulbright (NRF) made headlines in 2017 by pulling off mergers in the US and Australia, but 2018 has started with the firm retrenching internationally, closing in Kazakhstan and Abu Dhabi while Paul Hastings raided its Japanese corporate team.
NRF Tokyo head of corporate, M&A and securities Eiji Kobayashi joined Paul Hastings’ Japanese base in mid-January, with a four-person team, including two associates, one paralegal and one secretary, to follow him a few weeks later. Continue reading “After an expansive 2017, Norton Rose Fulbright starts year with Asia pullback”
Bird & Bird has bolstered its Budapest operations by adding a 20-strong Weil, Gotshal & Manges team, bringing the US firm’s presence in Hungary to an end.
Both parties insisted that the two-partner team move on 1 February was the result of an ‘amicable arrangement’ between the firms rather than headhunting by Bird & Bird. Continue reading “An ‘amicable’ discussion sees Weil Gotshal exit Hungary as 20-strong team joins Bird & Bird”
Eversheds Sutherland corporate head Richard Moulton cannot remember a busier December than in 2017 and believes the January deal market is already gathering pace.
As the transatlantic tie-up marked a year since going live this month, the firm has enjoyed a robust start to 2018. On 4 January, Eversheds advised as British retailer Poundland secured a £180m loan to reduce its reliance on its South African owner Steinhoff International, under investigation following accounting irregularities estimated at £7bn. Continue reading “On a roll: Eversheds Sutherland sees December deal flurry carry over”
Newcomers to London quickly learn the rules of the escalator: stand still on the right or keep moving on the left. The risk with changing your mind is you can land flat on your face.
For Eversheds Sutherland, the consensus view is that its corporate team has stood on the right for years, moving along but hardly dashing. And why not? You still get where you are going. Continue reading “Deal view: Eversheds deal team – so much promise but so much steady”
Freshfields is acting for the official receiver
One of the largest UK insolvencies for years, the collapse of construction giant Carillion is poised to have a wide-ranging impact on a number of industries, not least among the most prominent restructuring and insolvency advisers in the City. Continue reading “Carillion collapse: Global 100 firms take centre stage as construction giant enters liquidation”
Continue reading “Dealwatch: the Magic Circle players kicking off 2018”
‘All the top people in this country have grey hair,’ notes one Milan playmaker. It is a truth Italians know all too well: those pulling the strings of the country’s politics and economy are often years past the average European age of retirement. And law is no exception.
The country’s top firms still owe their success to a few veteran rainmakers and their decade-old connections. Individuals like Sergio Erede, Michele Carpinelli and Francesco Gianni, all past 65, still define Italy’s legal market more than 20 years since foreign advisers first arrived in scale. The three largest independents – BonelliErede, Chiomenti and Gianni, Origoni, Grippo, Cappelli & Partners – all generate comfortably over €100m (exact figures must be taken with a pinch of salt).
Continue reading “Letter from… Milan: Living in style yet still playing the generation game”
Darren Jones discusses leaving his role at telecoms giant BT to sit in the UK Parliament
Many were surprised when Darren Jones was elected Labour MP for Bristol North West – none more so than Jones himself. Except for, perhaps, his boss at BT Legal.
Pride before a fall. Everything was going well when the world’s first listed law firm, Slater and Gordon, announced another blockbuster UK buyout in early 2015.
‘In getting to this point, we undertook a very extensive due diligence process,’ said the firm’s managing director, Andrew Grech. ‘The business we are buying is of high quality with robust infrastructure and systems, and good people. This move will accelerate and consolidate our position in the UK market, and bring benefits to the clients and staff of both businesses.’
Continue reading “The Icarus syndrome – the highs and lows of Slater and Gordon”
Disruption looms as James Wood reports on first European conference for CLOC
Richard Susskind must have lost count of the number of times he has spoken about the future of law, but in his introductory remarks to the 2018 CLOC EMEA Institute gathering in London he seemed cheerfully off balance. Many of the concepts Susskind has prophesied are now realities at large US companies and even sceptics would concede that the emergence of sophisticated legal operations teams feels like a decisive shift for the industry.
It has been an expansive start of the year in terms of partner hires for a group of finance-focused US shops with tight London operations.
First Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft’s City restructuring practice was decimated by the departure of four partners to Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, led by global financial restructuring co-chair Yushan Ng, with Jacqueline Ingram, Karen McMaster and Sinjini Saha following him. McMaster and Ingram had already followed Ng in changing firms in 2013 from Linklaters, where they were associates. Saha was made partner when she joined Cadwalader from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in 2015.
Continue reading “Cadwalader takes multiple hits in London as Milbank and Brown Rudnick swoop in”
Nathalie Tidman assesses the fallout as M&A veteran quits an unsettled City giant
Even for a market grown blithe to big-name M&A partners quitting for the dollar, Kirkland & Ellis’s recruitment of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer’s David Higgins just before Christmas sent a jolt. Continue reading “Can Freshfields limit the damage as Kirkland tempts PE heavyweight with $10m transfer?”
It has been the question raised over wine by many seasoned litigators for months now: what’s going on at Enyo Law? At the beginning of last year, the litigation boutique hit the headlines thanks to surprise merger talks with fellow disputes specialist Stewarts Law, but since the discussion was abandoned the influential outfit has gone to ground.
Formed by ex-Addleshaw Goddard partners Simon Twigden (pictured), Pietro Marino and Michael Green, Enyo was launched in 2010 with a post-Lehman preoccupation of litigating against banks. The concept was simple: pick up the big-ticket work that larger firms were conflicted out of. Continue reading “Disputes Eye: Enyo goes to ground – what next for the pioneering disputes shop?”
1998 seems like a lifetime ago, where e-commerce was a fantasy for ordinary people just discovering the internet. Yet 1998 was year zero for the European Union’s Data Protection Directive – the basis for legislation protecting personal data across member states today.
But over the past two decades, digitalisation has detonated a data explosion, giving rise to data mining on a level of sophistication and scale that was unthinkable at the time the directive was conceived. In keeping with the spirit of our globalised age, data, like everything else, is ‘big’ – and so are the threats.
‘You will have to go out and find the women – they won’t come to you,’ warns Travers Smith partner Lucie Cawood when Legal Business began researching this cover feature. That proved an astute prediction.
Searching for senior female talent in the City, amid weeks spent amassing nearly 60 interviews with partners, law firm leaders, corporate heads and recruiters, it becomes clear that it takes more work to get women deal lawyers talking than their male equivalents. A lot more. Continue reading “Alphas – the hunt for female deal stars (and why it’s hard to be a City woman)”
Anecdotally, in-house budgets are being scrutinised like never before, and law firm billing is starting to catch the attention of chief financial officers.
As almost any general counsel (GC) will tell you, legal teams are coming under sustained pressure to introduce metrics and benchmarks, along with more robust financial management and project management tools, to help demonstrate their grasp on value. In short, procurement methodologies are now being applied to legal services. Continue reading “Client Intelligence Report: Data view – Big talk on legal ops fails to change buying habits”
