ICT Legal Consulting is an international law firm founded in 2011 with offices in Milan, Bologna, Rome and Amsterdam, and a presence in 19 other countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the USA). Continue reading “Firm Showcase: ICT Legal Consulting”
The legal implications of new technologies have been making headlines recently, with a group of more than 100 specialists in robotics submitting an open letter to the United Nations urging a ban on the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence in weapon systems. But on the commercial side the change capturing lawyers’ attention is not cutting-edge tech but the creeping maturity of IT systems that have been around for years. As Louise Pentland, general counsel of PayPal, comments: ‘The disruptive trends that are likely to shape business in the coming months are existing technologies becoming more capable.’
One of the best examples of a disruptive trend developing from technology that most businesses are already familiar with is the sudden ubiquity of cloud computing. Although moving business processes to the cloud is technologically passé – remote processing through application service providers (ASPs) has been around for nearly 20 years – internet speeds were, until recently, too slow to allow for anything beyond simple processes to be migrated. Now it is entering the mainstream. In early June 2017 Lloyds Bank finally signed its long-planned outsourcing contract with IBM, a £1.3bn deal that will see a large number of staff, along with core business processes, move over to IBM. Many large organisations are likely to follow.
Kit Burden, global co-head of technology sector at DLA Piper, says the impending mass migration to the cloud will change the way businesses think about the relationship between their core and support processes.
‘Concerns around security and data protection that have traditionally inhibited engagement with the cloud seem to be ebbing, and cloud providers are working out how to handle business-critical processes in a seamless way. We are seeing a demonstrable uptick in both take-up and deal sizes and it is having a very interesting domino effect in the market. The next 12 months will see cloud providers take over large parts of many businesses’ operations and it will lead to a big change in how global organisations operate.’
Baker McKenzie IT partner Harry Small echoes the point. ‘Lawyers like to highlight the dangers surrounding data protection and security in the cloud but for clients the economics are overwhelming and increased use of cloud services is inevitable. Security concerns aside, it is essential to do thorough diligence on a provider before migrating business processes. Cloud contracts tend to be very short term and can be switched off at will, but the danger, from the customer’s point of view, is that it remains difficult to get your data out in a manageable way.’
One result of this move toward outsourcing business-critical processes, says Chris Fowler, GC UK Commercial Legal Services at BT Group, is that in-house teams are increasingly likely to oversee the work themselves. ‘Outsourcing has become such an important part of business efficiency that you have to understand a lot of internal processes to get it right. In-house lawyers are, very generally, expected to know a lot more about outsourcing than previously. Contracts also tend to be shorter in duration and divided between different providers. As a result, managing various providers and making them work together has become more important than understanding the underlying laws.’
That comes as a threat to outside counsel specialising in outsourcing work. Robert Shooter, head of technology, outsourcing and privacy at Fieldfisher, the largest technology and outsourcing team in Europe, comments: ‘We are seeing a lot of the traditional big deals staying in-house now with clients sending only very specialised pieces of an outsourcing or the high-volume, low-cost aspects of it to firms. We see it as an opportunity to ask ourselves what our clients want from their external lawyers.’ Mitigating this loss of revenue, a growing focus on data privacy is leading to a big uptick in work. Fieldfisher has taken on ten new hires in the last 12 months, and Shooter says the firm expects client demand for data protection expertise to remain strong well into 2018.
Lawyers highlight the dangers surrounding data protection in the cloud but for clients the economics are overwhelming.
Harry Small – Baker McKenzie
Indeed, the big trend of the coming 12 months, says Richard Kemp of Kemp IT Law, is that legal aspects of data – from data rights and sovereignty to security and protection – will become even more important to in-house teams. ‘Data protection has gone from one of those slightly geeky areas that you’d occasionally see one or two lawyers specialise in at the larger firms to the in-demand skill that clients are looking for.’
Simply taking the UK’s example, it is easy to see why data protection is no longer an afterthought for GCs. Under the 1998 Data Protection Act, the largest fine that the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) could levy was £500,000. The largest fine it had ever levied before 2017 was £250,000. That has now changed, and the ICO is becoming more robust. This year alone it has levied two £400,000 fines. But the big change is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into force across the EU, including the UK, on 25 May 2018 and introduces a maximum fine of 4% of global turnover for data security breaches.
With the growing interest in outsourcing to the cloud, the shadow of GDPR-related fines for misuse of data looms large. ‘Five years ago, most outsourcing contracts allowed for data protection to be an unlimited loss,’ says Burden. ‘Data loss may have been a big worry for customers but it was economically a relatively trivial issue for suppliers. With the ramping up of national data regulators and the introduction of GDPR, the way contracts get scrutinised will fundamentally change.’
Kemp is seeing a similar shift in the way contracts are approached. ‘Trade-offs with security, the kind of indemnity protection the provider gives, and the liability position they are prepared to adopt will change, but the precise outcome is hard to predict at this stage. Cloud services are commoditised, which means there is not sufficient margin for providers to give the type of liability protection a customer would need in the event of misuse.’
Not only are the potential losses through fines much larger, but the introduction, under GDPR, of processor liability will also change the dynamics of contracts. As things stand, if a business outsources its customer relationship management system to a provider in the EU, the entity outsourcing its data is the only one liable to be fined (usually not very much). After GDPR takes effect the processor (ie outsourcer) will equally be regulated. As a result, any contract between controller and processor will have a different balance of power.
Of course, any law that restricts businesses’ ability to monetise data will cause friction, and it looks certain that the European principles of data protection and privacy will come into conflict with the tech giants of Silicon Valley. The Trump administration has signalled that it will take a more lenient approach to data protection, which does not bode well in the face of the EU’s increasingly stringent requirements.
Every GC is going to spend a lot of time looking at data protection. There will be a huge wave of work for law firms. Richard Kemp – Kemp IT Law
Ruth Boardman of Bird & Bird notes: ‘When companies come to trade in the EU from other jurisdictions they can find it difficult to get their heads around the fact that we don’t see data as an asset. From their perspective they have sweated blood and tears to generate data and they should be able to monetise it.’
It is likely that battles that have traditionally been fought in the arena of competition law, where fines can reach up to 10% of turnover, will be revisited in data protection cases. However, Kemp takes a more circumspect view of the risks to business. ‘Every GC is going to spend a lot of time looking at data protection before May next year and there will be a huge wave of work for law firms, but I would caution against listening to some of the hype coming from the service supplier community about how challenging it will be to comply. I take a fairly pragmatic view, which is that companies should comply but not over-invest in their compliance strategy. Knowing what to do is as much a project type approach as a legal analysis.’
Rachel Jacobs, GC of Springer Nature, picks up the theme: ‘Increasingly we are facing the sort of regulations that link legal analysis, IT specialists and questions of what the business is trying to achieve. These are no longer regulations that can be approached from a legal silo, though there are fundamentally important legal questions associated with them.’
Away from outsourcing and data protection, a notable trend across the TMT sector – driven by the pace of technological change and poor economic conditions – is the relative lack of litigation. While there have been some major cases in the High Court and the Technology and Construction Court involving technology and communications contracts, Harry Small says these represent only a small fraction of the general disputes in the sector. ‘TMT today is best characterised as contentious but not litigious. The really large amounts of work we get are contracts that have gone wrong but are never going to reach the courts. There is a growing tendency to re-evaluate contracts and enter into structured renegotiation.’
A bigger legal change, says Small, is yet to come. ‘Automated or artificial intelligence will fundamentally change IP law in the sector. A computer programme now does a lot of the work that a human might formerly do, even such things as drafting contracts and credit scoring. The question that arises is twofold: who owns the output and, more particularly, who owns the algorithms and decision processes made by the software?’
UK law has a small provision covering this question, which Small himself helped insert in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. The provision states: ‘In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.’ It is a vague provision, says Small, but one which the EU was not prepared to follow at the time. ‘The harmonisation of copyright law across the EU, quite wrongly in my opinion, took the view that copyright works must have a human author. This is almost certainly a linguistic reflection of the Droit d’auteur or Urheberrecht, but we are in a world that is rapidly moving away from humans as the sole authors of output. When Brexit gives us the freedom to look at our intellectual property laws again, we will have a great opportunity to make laws that reflect the world we live in.’
Such laws may reshape the sector entirely, but in the coming months GCs are more likely to focus on less cutting-edge technologies. As Pentland concludes: ‘It is tempting to say there is nothing new about digital transformation – almost every company has moved to online and digital offerings – but implementing a proper digital transformation strategy means ripping up what you have done previously and doing it all in a different way, enabled through technology. That is doing something new in response to something not quite so new, but that is what being a lawyer in the TMT space is all about. Software licences, open-source and outsourcing were all once at the leading edge of law, but the real question for in-house lawyers comes when they stop being at the leading edge and start to become something that impacts the way your business is structured.’
The legal implications of new technologies have been making headlines recently, with a group of more than 100 specialists in robotics submitting an open letter to the United Nations urging a ban on the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence in weapon systems. But on the commercial side the change capturing lawyers’ attention is not cutting-edge tech but the creeping maturity of IT systems that have been around for years. As Louise Pentland, general counsel of PayPal, comments: ‘The disruptive trends that are likely to shape business in the coming months are existing technologies becoming more capable.’
One of the best examples of a disruptive trend developing from technology that most businesses are already familiar with is the sudden ubiquity of cloud computing. Although moving business processes to the cloud is technologically passé – remote processing through application service providers (ASPs) has been around for nearly 20 years – internet speeds were, until recently, too slow to allow for anything beyond simple processes to be migrated. Now it is entering the mainstream. In early June 2017 Lloyds Bank finally signed its long-planned outsourcing contract with IBM, a £1.3bn deal that will see a large number of staff, along with core business processes, move over to IBM. Many large organisations are likely to follow.
Kit Burden, global co-head of technology sector at DLA Piper, says the impending mass migration to the cloud will change the way businesses think about the relationship between their core and support processes.
‘Concerns around security and data protection that have traditionally inhibited engagement with the cloud seem to be ebbing, and cloud providers are working out how to handle business-critical processes in a seamless way. We are seeing a demonstrable uptick in both take-up and deal sizes and it is having a very interesting domino effect in the market. The next 12 months will see cloud providers take over large parts of many businesses’ operations and it will lead to a big change in how global organisations operate.’
Baker McKenzie IT partner Harry Small echoes the point. ‘Lawyers like to highlight the dangers surrounding data protection and security in the cloud but for clients the economics are overwhelming and increased use of cloud services is inevitable. Security concerns aside, it is essential to do thorough diligence on a provider before migrating business processes. Cloud contracts tend to be very short term and can be switched off at will, but the danger, from the customer’s point of view, is that it remains difficult to get your data out in a manageable way.’
One result of this move toward outsourcing business-critical processes, says Chris Fowler, GC UK Commercial Legal Services at BT Group, is that in-house teams are increasingly likely to oversee the work themselves. ‘Outsourcing has become such an important part of business efficiency that you have to understand a lot of internal processes to get it right. In-house lawyers are, very generally, expected to know a lot more about outsourcing than previously. Contracts also tend to be shorter in duration and divided between different providers. As a result, managing various providers and making them work together has become more important than understanding the underlying laws.’
That comes as a threat to outside counsel specialising in outsourcing work. Robert Shooter, head of technology, outsourcing and privacy at Fieldfisher, the largest technology and outsourcing team in Europe, comments: ‘We are seeing a lot of the traditional big deals staying in-house now with clients sending only very specialised pieces of an outsourcing or the high-volume, low-cost aspects of it to firms. We see it as an opportunity to ask ourselves what our clients want from their external lawyers.’ Mitigating this loss of revenue, a growing focus on data privacy is leading to a big uptick in work. Fieldfisher has taken on ten new hires in the last 12 months, and Shooter says the firm expects client demand for data protection expertise to remain strong well into 2018.
Lawyers highlight the dangers surrounding data protection in the cloud but for clients the economics are overwhelming.
Harry Small – Baker McKenzie
Indeed, the big trend of the coming 12 months, says Richard Kemp of Kemp IT Law, is that legal aspects of data – from data rights and sovereignty to security and protection – will become even more important to in-house teams. ‘Data protection has gone from one of those slightly geeky areas that you’d occasionally see one or two lawyers specialise in at the larger firms to the in-demand skill that clients are looking for.’
Simply taking the UK’s example, it is easy to see why data protection is no longer an afterthought for GCs. Under the 1998 Data Protection Act, the largest fine that the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) could levy was £500,000. The largest fine it had ever levied before 2017 was £250,000. That has now changed, and the ICO is becoming more robust. This year alone it has levied two £400,000 fines. But the big change is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into force across the EU, including the UK, on 25 May 2018 and introduces a maximum fine of 4% of global turnover for data security breaches.
With the growing interest in outsourcing to the cloud, the shadow of GDPR-related fines for misuse of data looms large. ‘Five years ago, most outsourcing contracts allowed for data protection to be an unlimited loss,’ says Burden. ‘Data loss may have been a big worry for customers but it was economically a relatively trivial issue for suppliers. With the ramping up of national data regulators and the introduction of GDPR, the way contracts get scrutinised will fundamentally change.’
Kemp is seeing a similar shift in the way contracts are approached. ‘Trade-offs with security, the kind of indemnity protection the provider gives, and the liability position they are prepared to adopt will change, but the precise outcome is hard to predict at this stage. Cloud services are commoditised, which means there is not sufficient margin for providers to give the type of liability protection a customer would need in the event of misuse.’
Not only are the potential losses through fines much larger, but the introduction, under GDPR, of processor liability will also change the dynamics of contracts. As things stand, if a business outsources its customer relationship management system to a provider in the EU, the entity outsourcing its data is the only one liable to be fined (usually not very much). After GDPR takes effect the processor (ie outsourcer) will equally be regulated. As a result, any contract between controller and processor will have a different balance of power.
Of course, any law that restricts businesses’ ability to monetise data will cause friction, and it looks certain that the European principles of data protection and privacy will come into conflict with the tech giants of Silicon Valley. The Trump administration has signalled that it will take a more lenient approach to data protection, which does not bode well in the face of the EU’s increasingly stringent requirements.
Every GC is going to spend a lot of time looking at data protection. There will be a huge wave of work for law firms. Richard Kemp – Kemp IT Law
Ruth Boardman of Bird & Bird notes: ‘When companies come to trade in the EU from other jurisdictions they can find it difficult to get their heads around the fact that we don’t see data as an asset. From their perspective they have sweated blood and tears to generate data and they should be able to monetise it.’
It is likely that battles that have traditionally been fought in the arena of competition law, where fines can reach up to 10% of turnover, will be revisited in data protection cases. However, Kemp takes a more circumspect view of the risks to business. ‘Every GC is going to spend a lot of time looking at data protection before May next year and there will be a huge wave of work for law firms, but I would caution against listening to some of the hype coming from the service supplier community about how challenging it will be to comply. I take a fairly pragmatic view, which is that companies should comply but not over-invest in their compliance strategy. Knowing what to do is as much a project type approach as a legal analysis.’
Rachel Jacobs, GC of Springer Nature, picks up the theme: ‘Increasingly we are facing the sort of regulations that link legal analysis, IT specialists and questions of what the business is trying to achieve. These are no longer regulations that can be approached from a legal silo, though there are fundamentally important legal questions associated with them.’
Away from outsourcing and data protection, a notable trend across the TMT sector – driven by the pace of technological change and poor economic conditions – is the relative lack of litigation. While there have been some major cases in the High Court and the Technology and Construction Court involving technology and communications contracts, Harry Small says these represent only a small fraction of the general disputes in the sector. ‘TMT today is best characterised as contentious but not litigious. The really large amounts of work we get are contracts that have gone wrong but are never going to reach the courts. There is a growing tendency to re-evaluate contracts and enter into structured renegotiation.’
A bigger legal change, says Small, is yet to come. ‘Automated or artificial intelligence will fundamentally change IP law in the sector. A computer programme now does a lot of the work that a human might formerly do, even such things as drafting contracts and credit scoring. The question that arises is twofold: who owns the output and, more particularly, who owns the algorithms and decision processes made by the software?’
UK law has a small provision covering this question, which Small himself helped insert in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. The provision states: ‘In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.’ It is a vague provision, says Small, but one which the EU was not prepared to follow at the time. ‘The harmonisation of copyright law across the EU, quite wrongly in my opinion, took the view that copyright works must have a human author. This is almost certainly a linguistic reflection of the Droit d’auteur or Urheberrecht, but we are in a world that is rapidly moving away from humans as the sole authors of output. When Brexit gives us the freedom to look at our intellectual property laws again, we will have a great opportunity to make laws that reflect the world we live in.’
Such laws may reshape the sector entirely, but in the coming months GCs are more likely to focus on less cutting-edge technologies. As Pentland concludes: ‘It is tempting to say there is nothing new about digital transformation – almost every company has moved to online and digital offerings – but implementing a proper digital transformation strategy means ripping up what you have done previously and doing it all in a different way, enabled through technology. That is doing something new in response to something not quite so new, but that is what being a lawyer in the TMT space is all about. Software licences, open-source and outsourcing were all once at the leading edge of law, but the real question for in-house lawyers comes when they stop being at the leading edge and start to become something that impacts the way your business is structured.’
During Apple’s earnings conference call in May, chief executive Tim Cook discussed the company’s long-running and bitter dispute with Qualcomm, a company that manufactures internal components for the iPhone.
‘Qualcomm is trying to charge Apple a percentage of the total iPhone value. They do some great work around standard-essential patents, but Qualcomm’s component is only one small part of the iPhone. We don’t think that’s right, so we’re taking a principled stand on it and we strongly believe we’re in the right. I am sure they think they’re in the right, and that’s what courts are for.’
Continue reading “The cutting edge”
When the global financial crisis struck in 2008, the impact reverberated far beyond the traditional financial centres of the West. Initial speculation was that Asia would be relatively well insulated from the crisis due to the growing financial independence of the region. Instead, the effects hit at a speed and depth that surpassed all expectations. Under fire, financial institutions sought to reduce their exposure to the region, resulting in a steep decline in the value of currency and equity markets, at a time when the price and volume of exports was plummeting.
The immediate impact of the crisis gave way to an equally brisk recovery, bolstered by strong domestic demand in China and Indonesia preventing both economies from falling into recession. But while sophisticated financial centres were swift in their regulatory response to the crisis, particularly where reform to over-the-counter financial products and transparency were concerned, much of Asia has lagged behind. Continue reading “Banking on change”
I started at Paisner and then on qualification went off to Norton Rose. I joined Clifford Chance in 2000, which was the big global merger. They were a challenger in M&A. That’s why I chose them.
I started off at Midland Bank in Fleet Street opposite Freshfields. One of six trainees. Later I sent out 86 applications for articles. Four interviews and only one offer would pay my law school. That’s why I went to Paisner. Continue reading “Life during law: Patrick Sarch, White & Case”
Imagine the worst: within the last 72 hours, your company has been hit by a major crisis. There may have been serious damage to the community in which you operate. Your customers may have suffered, people’s livelihoods may have been destroyed, the environment may be irretrievably damaged. Some of your employees and contractors may be injured, or worse. Your investors will be livid, and the board looking to assign blame. By the end of the first week, chances are your organisation will be facing dozens of lawsuits, some set to become class actions over time.
At this early stage, you will realise that verifiable facts are few and far between. Opinions and rumours abound. You will have little or no idea of the extent of any physical or financial damage, or to what degree the organisation was complicit in the event. You do not even know which of your top team you can count on. Some of them may be implicated; others may be operationally inexperienced, unfamiliar with the political realities, or temperamentally unsuited to the new situation – filled with good intentions, but uncertain what role to play. Continue reading “Beware the Black Swan”
Barry Devereux, managing partner of Irish leader McCann FitzGerald, is not letting the bad Irish weather dampen his spirits. ‘The Irish market is buoyant and there are a lot of things going on. The economy is growing, markets are good and debt is relatively inexpensive. The climate is good for deal-making. Brexit is the reality, but it will undoubtedly provide opportunities across the financial services market in Dublin. It has given a fillip to the market in terms of the interest in real estate, and people looking for accommodation and office space. Dublin is doing very well.’
Dublin’s legal market continues to boom. The impact of Brexit undoubtedly dented the transactional market in the last six months of 2016, but the shock has, for the most part, subsided and many practice areas are busy. Real estate has enjoyed a particular resurgence after the painful post-bailout year, while corporate and finance lawyers are always in high demand. But the Irish market is also enjoying a boom in more niche areas, including data protection and intellectual property, particularly with the incoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and legal works in the fields of fintech, regulatory investigations and online gaming. Continue reading “Emerald Ambitions”
Oh for the days when politics was the last thing on the minds of City advisers. For years, British politics was an ignored backdrop for a legal profession used to a globalist, free-market agenda since the 1980s. How quaint such times seem in a national economy and City now overshadowed by Brexit and a convulsing political dynamic in a country once famed for stable one-party government.
Teaming up with NatWest, Legal Business gathered a group of senior City lawyers on the evening of the UK’s general election on 8 June to gauge what is on the agenda for the UK’s largest law firms. If nothing else it was striking how concerned – and disenchanted – City lawyers have become with the political classes and uncertainty… even speaking just hours before it became clear that the Conservative government was to lose its working majority. Continue reading “A long time in politics”
As the debate over the future of London as a legal hub in a post-Brexit world rages on, London boutique firms and City practices that occupy the second half of the Legal Business 100 (LB100) have quietly got on with business.
While in 2015/16 this group of firms was arguably the strongest-performing in the LB100, Brexit – and its prevailing effect on the UK real estate market – has proven a stubborn opponent. As such, while collective performance is short of previous years, for the most part these London firms have battled through uncertainty to record stable results. Continue reading “Legal Business 100: The second 50 – Eyes on the prize”
Stewarts Law, the UK’s largest litigation-only firm, had an eventful 2016/17 financial year, which resulted in its third consecutive period of double-digit growth. As a standout performer across the Legal Business 100 (LB100) as a whole, the firm had a record year with turnover rising 25% to £77.9m and profit per equity partner (PEP) climbing 19% to £1.9m, seeing it move up into the top half of the LB100 for the first time. It has become recognised as one of the fastest-growing players organically in the UK legal market, with revenue growing 123% over the last five years. PEP rose 110% over the same time period.
Year-on-year performance in 2016/17 was boosted by the resolution of some significant mandates last year, most notably the £4bn shareholder group action against The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) in which Stewarts’ claimant clients took a settlement offer in December 2016 in a case against RBS’ former chief executive Fred Goodwin and three other directors.
Stewarts is also currently in battle with Tesco on behalf of over 125 institutional funds, who claim they lost money as a result of Tesco overstating its profits by £263m in October 2014.
‘We keep an open mind, but we want to remain a litigation-only business, so it’s a small market for us in terms of mergers.’
John Cahill, Stewarts Law
Coming as a surprise to many after years of startling organic financial performance, Stewarts looked at a potential merger with boutique Enyo Law in early 2017 to create an £80m disputes specialist. The acquisition of Enyo was in the preliminary stages before it was called off, with Stewarts managing partner John Cahill saying at the time that the firm wanted to ‘continue down the path of organic growth and selected lateral hires’.
True to Cahill’s word, Stewarts has made a couple of select lateral hires of substantial seniority over the past year. Firstly, veteran litigator Ian Gatt QC arrived from Herbert Smith Freehills’ advocacy unit in October 2016, bringing with him over 30 years’ experience in both litigation and arbitration disputes.
In June this year, Stewarts brought in Dechert commercial litigation veteran David Hughes. Hughes, who also served as Berwin Leighton Paisner’s head of banking and finance litigation for nine years, slotted into Stewarts’ core commercial litigation practice. However, the firm did lose partner Daniel Loblowitz in July, who left to join property firm Jury O’Shea and build his own practice.
LB: Did any areas thrive or perform poorly over the last year?
John Cahill: Our commercial disputes department had a very strong year. But our newest departments that we’ve set up over the last few years, such as arbitration, tax and trust litigation, need growth and critical mass added to them. Our challenge for the next year will be to focus on building them up.
Has Brexit had any tangible impact over the last financial year?
Cahill: For us, no. In terms of the future, it’s difficult to make predictions. It’s likely that litigation will be less affected by the uncertainty of Brexit than other practices. Market uncertainty may reduce transactional volumes for a period of time, which will be a problem for firms doing that kind of work. If it’s going to bring a harder financial climate, the counter-cyclical nature of litigation may mean we find more work with our clients. It has to be a priority for the government that London remains an international centre for resolving disputes. It’s a major export, so it’s important this is not threatened.
Following the scrapped proposed merger with Enyo, is the firm looking forward to any other mergers?
Cahill: You’ve only got to turn on your computer or read the legal press to see that potential mergers are always being talked about. We keep an open mind, but we want to remain a litigation-only business, so it’s a small market for us in terms of mergers. We’re in no rush to go down that road.
From living with Brexit to harnessing technology, Legal Business 100 leaders state what must be done to thrive
‘We’ve been building on our strengths and worrying less about the things we don’t do but other firms do. We’ve been forced to make choices that we didn’t have to ten years ago because it isn’t viable anymore to do everything or pretend to do everything. Not even the Magic Circle can do that. It is about identifying where you want to play and focusing on that.’
Jeremy Hoyland, managing partner, Simmons & Simmons Continue reading “The last word: A period of drama”
Associate pay used to be simple. Lockstepped and transparent to the nth degree on both sides of the Atlantic, you knew exactly where you stood and exactly when the legal market was overheating.
There were obvious downsides to such transparency. Back in the late 1990s/2000s boom, a salary war triggered by Palo Alto law firms within weeks translated into huge hikes in New York. Soon enough London followed when SJ Berwin announced 25% pay hikes that spread through the market like wildfire. This was the first age of the online message boards, which further stoked the inflationary pay cycle. Continue reading “Associate pay smoke screen: it’s fooling no-one”
The veteran criminal defence lawyer turned legal head on bridging the gap between journalism and law
While a student at the University of Wales, Angus McBride mulled his career prospects. During his first year at university, he was obliged to choose three subjects to study. ‘I took English literature and philosophy and then decided I was going to do law as well. It was a last-minute thought.’ Continue reading “Client profile: Angus McBride, News UK”
LB100 firms weather initial Brexit turbulence but good times remain a distant memory
Flattered by turbulent forex markets, the UK’s largest law firms outperformed smaller rivals in the Legal Business 100 (LB100), as the group weathered economic and political headwinds through 2016/17 to eke out an ultimately indifferent performance. Continue reading “The LB100: Forex flatters market leaders but most struggle to find their form in another tough year”
Tom Baker charts the evolution of dispute funding from case-by-base institutional backers
Litigation funding has been a growing aspect of the dispute resolution sector for a decade now, but news this summer that two law firms have entered into broader partnerships with funders highlights the emergence of a more fundamental role for such bankrollers.
Madeleine Farman assesses the impact of another round of pay rises on the City market
As US firms continue to hike associate pay for UK lawyers, members of the City’s legal elite are getting increasingly coy over what they are offering their junior ranks… but are such tactics sustainable in the long run?
In the wake of the banking crisis, some commentators claimed the legal industry was set for a bloodbath that would sweep away 10,000 solicitors’ jobs from a flabby trade. As so often, the profession defied the critics, handling its post-Lehman reboot with assurance. Now, after posting on the face of it impressive numbers for 2016/17 in the shadow of Brexit and two major electoral upsets, there is talk of the resilience of the industry. The Legal Business 100 (LB100) has, after all, grown from £12.25bn to £22.06bn over the last decade and this year the group at long last surpassed its record PEP of £703,000 set way back in 2008.
And yet scratch the surface and there is much cause for unease. A good chunk of the long-term growth of the UK’s largest firms is due to consolidation, while the 2016/17 results have been hugely flattered by currency movements. Taken as one year, the numbers are respectable, but the long-term view is ominous, particularly for the City’s traditional leaders. Continue reading “Bangs and whimpers – LB100 performance is a lot weaker than it looks”
Marco Cillario finds deal professionals heaving a sigh of relief after a nail-biting end to 2016
Economic and political shocks took their toll on the deal market in the first half of 2017 as activity levels dipped but M&A professionals are sizing up the crucial post-summer period in an unexpectedly upbeat mood thanks to a run of big-ticket bids.
The headline of the last lengthy piece Legal Business carried on Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer said it all: The Last Champions. While there is no doubt that the Magic Circle has faced huge challenges asserting itself since the banking crisis, for many Freshfields was the member of the club with the best prospect of securing its place in the global elite.
But the City giant will be faring much worse on the profession’s saloon bar test if it keeps generating headlines like this summer, notably the news in July that co-managing partner Chris Pugh was stepping down less than halfway through his term. This surprise announcement came in the same month as financial results showed Freshfields being comprehensively outclassed by its City peers. Freshfields’ revenues have grown by just 17% in five years and the firm has been a fitful performer for nearly a decade now. While the metrics look better in profitability and revenue-per-lawyer terms, Freshfields has certainly not outpaced London rivals even on its core targets. Continue reading “What ails Freshfields? Time is running out for ‘The Last Champions’”
