The NFU Mutual has appointed seven law firms including Clyde & Co, DAC Beachcroft and Kennedys to its revised English and Welsh legal panel following a comprehensive review and tender process.
Global London: King & Spalding hires Latham’s Daniel Friel as it builds City office
King & Spalding has hired Latham & Watkins’ former European vice chair of tax Daniel Friel, the latest in a number of strategic hires over the last 12 months as it looks to grow its London offering.
Mass hires: Fresh wave of Pillsbury partners join move to Winston & Strawn
Eight more Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman partners have resigned in New York, Washington DC and San Francisco to join Winston & Strawn, taking the firm’s haul of Pillsbury partners up to 11.
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GC Power List 2015: The Team Elite
Quality, outside scrutiny and Paxman – the LB Awards loom
Fantastic as I look in a DJ, I wouldn’t say by character I’m a natural awards-type person but I have always said that if you are going to do an awards ceremony, there’s no point unless you do it really well. And doing it well means putting your shoulder to the wheel in the research and judging. Which brings me to the 18th Legal Business Awards, which we will be holding later this month.
While we have traditionally judged the awards internally, it had long been my intention to set up an external judging panel to bring in outside scrutiny and increase the rigour of the process. Though we have always put a lot of effort into drawing up the shortlists and selecting the winners, inevitably having knowledgeable outsiders keeps you on your toes, increases the focus on the process and makes it harder to be swayed by personal bias.
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Life after Sir Nigel – They built it, now what?
DLA Piper’s new head Simon Levine jokes about avoiding becoming the David Moyes to his high-profile predecessor’s Alex Ferguson, but you could make a stronger case that Sir Nigel Knowles’ transformative track record at DLA Piper is closer to making him the firm’s Tony Blair.
Knowles took over an institution amid a period of upheaval and had to fight to establish his authority, which he duly did with a mix of flair, charisma and vision. Because those qualities – not in abundance in the legal profession at executive level during the 1990s – were supported by astute operational point-men like Andrew Darwin, it proved an incredibly potent formula.
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The case against value – the virtue that can become vice
It’s the spirit of the age that law firms feel the need to not only deliver better value and efficiency but to be seen to do so by clients.
And what could be wrong with that? The northshoring trend has been increasingly apparent in recent years, with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer – the closest to a traditional partnership in the big four – now gearing up for a huge move to Manchester. Clifford Chance, meanwhile, has made much of its efficiency and push to align itself to clients, a stance clear under the leadership of David Childs and even more front-and-centre under Matthew Layton.
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Freshfields’ northshoring planned on radical scale as City leader repositions for changing law market
Internal worries as firm’s new low-cost hub could affect up to 800 roles
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer’s decision to jump on the near-shoring wagon with its first low-cost services hub in Manchester is on a scale larger than its peers, with up to 800 support service jobs being transferred – a move which is unsettling some at its Fleet Street headquarters.
Severn Trent sticks by Eversheds as sole adviser until 2020
FTSE 100 water company Severn Trent has reappointed Eversheds as its sole adviser for a new five-year term, despite having strongly considered appointing at least two firms to its new roster.
The company’s review took proposals from a total of 13 firms across five different areas: debt recovery, employment, general quality regulation, property and combined competition/commercial economic regulation. The legal team at Severn Trent had originally planned to give the debt recovery mandate to a smaller, local firm because it didn’t have the volume of work to hand to a larger sole adviser. However several firms, including Eversheds, pitched for a single mandate.
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Linklaters suffers blow as US firms hire trio of leading partners
Linklaters lost a trio of heavyweight partners in February with Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy and Kirkland & Ellis cherry-picking from the Magic Circle firm.
Milbank built out its projects practice with the hire of two leading projects partners from Linklaters’ London office, Matthew Hagopian and Manzer Ijaz, who count among their clients Glencore, BP and Eni.
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Barclays Investment Bank hires new global GC
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s co-chair of its financial institutions Mark Shelton is leaving the US firm to join Barclays Investment Bank as its global general counsel (GC) and the regional GC for the Americas.
He leaves private practice after one year to return to the world of in-house in which he has over ten years’ experience. He joined Gibson Dunn in February 2014 from UBS where he was GC and global head of investigation and Americas GC in New York for almost 11 years.
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Mishcon gains ABS licence to include non-lawyers in partnership
Mishcon de Reya has become the latest firm to acquire an alternative business structure (ABS) licence from the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), a move that was prompted by bringing up to four key employees into the partnership.
Having applied for the licence last July, the firm was granted approval on 12 February and will become an ABS structure on 10 April.
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Branching out: RPC, Eversheds and Bird & Bird create new consultancy offerings
The recent push by major UK firms into non-legal services looks set to continue, with Bird & Bird and RPC both unveiling moves into non-legal consultancy, while Eversheds further expands its pioneering service.
Sticking with its technology, media and telecoms specialism, Bird & Bird in February established an IT project consultancy, Baseline, in a joint venture with Lancashire-based ASE Consulting. The endeavour sees partners, led by co-head of Bird & Bird’s transformational project team Dominic Cook, invest their own capital in the project, with the team agreeing to pass legal work back to the firm.
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Growing confidence and smaller intakes boost Magic Circle’s trainee retention rates
February saw a flurry of trainee retention rates announced, with the Magic Circle and top-tier firms posting higher rates than in 2014, though taken from smaller pools of young lawyers.
Allen & Overy (A&O) kept on the highest proportion of trainees among Magic Circle firms, with 93% (or 43 out of 46) newly-qualified lawyers being kept on – an increase from the 84% posted last year. Peer firms Clifford Chance and Linklaters were close behind, both unveiling retention rates of 91%, with 41 and 49 trainees staying on respectively. Figures were slightly lower at Slaughter and May, which kept on 37 newly-qualified lawyers (NQs) out of 42, or a rate of 88%, while Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer had the lowest rate of 85%, with 41 staying on from a cohort of 48.
A new generation and challenges ahead as BLP leader takes helm
Tom Moore on the challenges faced by BLP’s new leader
While Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) staged something of a recovery in 2013/14, longstanding managing partner Neville Eisenberg – who had attracted some internal criticism following a punishing 2012/13 trading period – announced just before Christmas that he would not seek another term. Will Lisa Mayhew, who in February was elected to succeed Eisenberg on 1 May after an intense election campaign, be able to refocus a firm that has faced some internal discord and a listing international strategy?
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Client profile: Alistair Asher, The Co-operative Group
The group’s general counsel on bringing the member-run organisation back from the brink
After spending 34 years at Allen & Overy (A&O), it took veteran corporate partner Alistair Asher just 48 hours to clear his desk and inform clients that he was taking on the general counsel (GC) role at crisis-hit The Co-operative Group (the Co-op) in June 2013.
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Latham leads the way with $300m revenue hike as US elite posts robust 2014 results
Jaishree Kalia assesses the winners and losers as the US reporting season kicks off
The broad-based economic recovery in the US proved a boon to many leading advisers in 2014, with firms enjoying a resurgence in corporate work, and robust levels of disputes and regulatory activity.
Global elite firms have insurance sector consolidation covered
Early 2015 has seen key deals take place as the insurance sector consolidates, with Canada’s property and casualty insurer Fairfax Financial Holdings being the latest to gain a significant presence in London with its takeover of speciality insurer Brit for £1.2bn.
Within a year of being listed on the London Stock Exchange, FTSE 250 insurer Brit turned to a Slaughter and May team, including corporate heavyweight Jeff Twentyman and Richard Smith, while Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison’s London-based capital markets and securities practice head Mark Bergman represented Brit on US law.
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Life During Law – John Reynolds
If you wanted to do litigation, there was no better place than Herbert Smith. I have no idea why but it was always going to be litigation. It was all I saw on TV and in books, there were no books written about M&A lawyers.
Suddenly the City just couldn’t get enough lawyers – if you had a pulse you could get a job in those days.
Spain prepares for IPO surge as US firms win key mandates on Aena’s €4.3bn float
The Spanish capital markets showed signs of improving last month as US firms Mayer Brown and Davis Polk & Wardwell won roles advising the world’s largest airport operator Aena on its €4.3bn float on the Madrid stock exchange.
The Spanish government’s disposal of its 49% stake in Aena, which operates some 47 airports worldwide, including Luton, gave the group a total equity value of up to €8.7bn. In what is the largest flotation on the Madrid stock market since the onset of the financial crisis, the value underscores the burgeoning confidence among investors about Spain’s rejuvenated capital markets and economy, and heralds a surge of new mandates for corporate and finance lawyers working in the country.
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