Six months on from being elected co-heads of Allen & Overy’s (A&O) capital markets global team, David Benton and Simon Hill (pictured) talk about market confidence, current focuses and how Peerpoint is a big part of their future with Legal Business.
Targeting USA: Linklaters reshuffles teams to boost corporate and disputes
Magic Circle firm Linklaters has moved its TMT and tax groups from its commercial division into corporate. The firm has overhauled a three-strand structure – corporate, commercial and finance and projects – in a bid to strengthen its corporate team as the firm looks to crack America.
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Global London: Respected Paris boutique launches City arm to target cross-border deals
French firm AyacheSalama has launched its first international office in the City with four partners as it looks to advise on client investment from London into France more efficiently.
Investing in law: Parabis secures £13m from Duke Street to fund upgrades
Parabis Group has secured a further £13m investment from private equity company Duke Street Capital with the aim to improve IT systems, property and staff.
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Legal Business celebrates 25 years and the profession as well
So, what mattered to you? Twenty five years since Legal Business launched to chronicle the dramatic changes in the legal profession much has changed and yet stays the same. Still, if you were going to launch the first publication to focus on the UK’s commercial legal sector, you couldn’t have picked a better time than 1990.
That decade was an incredible time for the profession. Primed by the twin forces of London’s Big Bang and the equally explosive phenomenon of the newly-merged Clifford Chance (CC), the 1990s had the lot: globalisation, drama, ambition, innovation, mergers, disaggregation, technology, accountants and DLA. Destinies were won and lost. By the end of the decade the profession was different. CC stands out – someone with a longer attention span than I should write a book on the firm in that era – it was an incredible institution, without question then the world’s most influential law firm. Continue reading “Legal Business celebrates 25 years and the profession as well”
The profession – our part in its downfall
In our 25-year anniversary coverage, Cass Business School’s Laura Empson repeats a familiar refrain about the negative impact of the legal media on the profession’s values in creating league tables, particularly those on the profitability of law firms.
There is nothing new about assertions that such rankings inflicted a huge cost to the ethos of the profession, stoking excess, greed and a culture of mobile stars. Legal Business is arguably the most directly responsible since it was the publication that in 1992 brought law firm financial rankings to the UK.
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The national market – brutally competitive but opportunity abounds
At one point in our Regional Insight report – a major collaboration with our colleagues at The Legal 500 included with this issue of Legal Business – one GC based in the North West discusses a recent pitch in which a City law firm came out best on price against regional rivals. Surprising as it may seem, it is reflective of a dynamic that has seen London advisers focus on handling work from UK regions after realising that simply aspiring to be a City leader is a road to nowhere for many firms.
This shift in focus comes with the acknowledgement that post-Lehman, demand for external law firm services in the UK has become more polarised. The need for high-end transactional and disputes advice still exists but is increasingly now the preserve of the elite firms in those fields in London. At the opposite end, in-house teams are retaining more work and will only outsource work to law firms if it is cost effective.
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Battle over, war begins
Clifford Chance set to face professional negligence claim by Excalibur funders
Clifford Chance (CC) is to face a professional negligence suit over the high-profile Excalibur dispute by the case’s funders and Greek shipping tycoons, the Lemos family.
Respected Paris boutique launches London arm to target deal work
French firm AyacheSalama has launched its first international office in the City with four partners as it looks to advise on client investment from London into France more efficiently.
The new City desk will practice French law only and aims to strengthen relationships with investment funds and banks, private equity funds and French companies that invest out of the City. It will also look to build out a client base that already includes Intermediate Capital Group, TowerBrook Capital Partners and MezzVest, with a focus on corporate M&A, private equity, finance and restructuring.
Continue reading “Respected Paris boutique launches London arm to target deal work”
Linklaters reshuffles to boost corporate and disputes
Magic Circle firm Linklaters has moved its TMT and tax groups from its commercial division into corporate. The firm has overhauled a three-strand structure – corporate, commercial and finance and projects – in a bid to strengthen its corporate team as the firm looks to crack America.
Around 40 lawyers globally from tax and TMT will come under the corporate umbrella, with the commercial group having been rebranded as dispute resolution.
Continue reading “Linklaters reshuffles to boost corporate and disputes”
Cyber risk moving up the in-house agenda
General counsel (GC) are increasingly involved in handling cyber security issues at board level, reflecting a more comprehensive shift towards effective risk management, research from Legal Business and PwC has revealed.
In a survey of corporate attitudes to cyber security risk this autumn, which garnered more than 800 responses from a broad mix of senior corporate managers, owners, legal and IT, nearly half (46%) of all GC respondents said they had delivered advice to the board on cyber and data security matters in the last year. Thirty five percent of GC respondents said this occurs on a quarterly basis.
Fried Frank faces multi-million professional negligence claim
Collyer Bristow pays £24m settlement over Rangers advice
US firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson is facing a professional negligence claim at London’s High Court. Made by a former client, it alleges multiple breaches of duty over advice provided on the enforcement of a commercial loan in France.
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‘There is a fundamental tension here’: Lawyers nervous about exceptions to professional privilege
With government intelligence agencies and tax authorities coming under a spotlight in recent weeks over the sourcing of legally privileged documentation, justification and potential implications for such action has increasingly generated cause for concern among City lawyers.
It emerged in November that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal had discovered that legally privileged documents may have been targeted by British intelligence agencies MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.
A&O and Linklaters scale back in Russia as foreign firms feel the brunt of sanctions
Law firms scramble to reposition Moscow practice as EU sanctions hit home Russia’s volatile political environment began to have an impact on international and domestic law firms in Moscow at the beginning of this year, but as 2015 nears, and with multiple rounds of international sanctions imposed on the country, the situation has dramatically deteriorated.
US and EU sanctions on Russia have taken their toll on many located in Moscow, including Allen & Overy (A&O), which offered redundancy packages at associate level in October; Linklaters, which seconded 19 associates into other regions; White & Case, which reduced its Moscow-based headcount across both partner and associate levels; and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, whose office associate headcount dropped.
Life During Law: Jason Glover, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett
Clifford Chance (CC) was a great place to be in the 1990s. Geoffrey Howe deserves a huge amount of credit. He instilled that we were on a journey everyone else was seeking to replicate. The car was travelling fast. The concept of delivering that globalisation was a very powerful thing.
I didn’t have a plan but a lot of fortune. I took a view early on that there were hundreds of great technical lawyers and I would never be able to distinguish on just that.
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Guerrillas in our midst: LCIA takes action on award delays and obstructionist tactics
Tom Moore assesses the impact of the new London arbitration rulebook
The battle lines between arbitration lawyers and litigators have long been drawn along arguments of efficiency and cost. The urban myth, somewhat manufactured by arbitration practitioners themselves, that arbitration is more expedient and less costly than its cousin in the courts has long been dismissed, while increasingly the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA) is not only competing with courts for big-ticket cases, but other institutions around the world.
Not always an ‘easy journey’: Q&A with Jonathan Scott, outgoing HSF senior partner
Tom Moore talks to Jonathan Scott, senior partner and chair at Herbert Smith Freehills, about management, why he’s stepping down early and his worries over the reputation of English law.
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Why have you decided to leave your post early?
We get all the partners together once every two years and, if we ran the election after our November conference, there would be a preoccupation with who would be the next senior partner. If we’re going to spend that money getting everyone together, it’s not the best use of time to be talking about internal issues, so I made a decision, and I want to make it very clear that it was my decision with some internal resistance, that we would have the election beforehand.
Double-edged – cutting both ways with third party funding
It’s been a turbulent year for third-party funders, from court battles shining a spotlight on risky investments to new entrants and exits. Legal Business scopes the changing landscape for litigation’s bankrollers.
In early autumn, high-flying disputes lawyer Harvey Rands was taking a vacation in upstate New York. While many spend breaks catching up on books and perfecting golf swings, Rands, one of Memery Crystal’s highest billers, held in his possession an embargoed draft of the Excalibur costs judgment, a Commercial Court ruling on one of the most controversial pieces of litigation in recent years. Crucially the ruling, made public on 23 October, found third-party funders liable for indemnity costs in what became a precedent for an industry historically dogged with a controversial reputation.
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The king is dead – hunting out the new breed of dealmakers in banking lawyers sights
The veteran deal bankers have moved on and there’s a new pecking order with US banks and credit funds staking their position in Europe’s leveraged finance market. Legal Business assesses the debt professionals that lawyers want on their speed dial.
‘The crisis hit and Paul de Rome, who was then head of leveraged finance at Citibank, said: “You’ve got to shoot someone – I’ll fall on my sword – take me down.” It was a pure sign of class I thought. He was 50. He’d made his money, and was letting the young ones keep their jobs. Looking back I realise the reason Paul was such a successful old dog was because he knew it was just the first stage of the crisis. When he got shot, all his shares vested and he’s currently a partner in private equity firm EQT, which is THE place to move to.’
‘Trophy assets’: Bakers and Taylor Wessing lead on Gherkin sale
Baker & McKenzie and Taylor Wessing helped finalise the sale of London’s iconic Gherkin building to the Safra Group for over £700m.
The sale last month of one of London’s most distinctive and recognisable landmarks, the 40-storey skyscraper, located at St Mary Axe in the City’s primary financial district, was placed into receivership in April after one of its owners was placed in insolvency, with big-four giant Deloitte appointed as receiver.
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