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Numbers crunching – the rise of KPIs for the progressive client

Traditional methods of assessing external legal advisers’ performance are giving way to a more formalised approach. Legal Business examines the rise of the key performance indicator.

‘It goes back to the old business truism that you can only manage what you measure,’ says Eversheds head of international, Stephen Hopkins, who is responsible for the firm’s single-supplier client relationships, a number of which use a series of well-established key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure adviser performance.

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Barclays cuts legal roster by 30% in global panel review

US firms find success as preferred advisers

Barclays has turned to a raft of US firms, including Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Latham & Watkins, for its preferred legal advisers as its latest panel review sees the banking group cut its legal roster by around 30% and move to a streamlined two-tier system of ‘preferred’ and ‘approved’ firms.

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Mishcon de Reya sees PEP soar by 16% while Pinsent Masons posts 4.6% revenue increase

Mishcon de Reya has hit its target of £100m in revenues by 2016, with 2013/14 turnover up 18% to £104.6m and profit per equity partner (PEP) up by 16% to £975,000, constituting 107% growth since 2009.

The results come as Pinsent Masons enjoyed an uptick in its financials for a second successive year, with revenue up 4.6% to £323.3m, while profit per lawyer increased by 11% from £40,000 to £44,500. PEP increased 4.7% from £387,000 to £405,000.

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Clifford Chance eclipses UK elite as Global 100 unveiled

Magic Circle firm posts 16% PEP hike against 7% revenue increase

Clifford Chance has emerged as the strongest-performing Magic Circle firm financially for 2013/14, as the UK elite all unveiled unaudited sterling figures to coincide with the launch of the Global 100 this month.

The 3,000-lawyer firm has revealed a 7% rise in revenues to £1.36bn, up from £1.27bn in 2013. Profit per equity partner (PEP) has increased significantly to push average partner drawings back to over £1m after a blip last year, up a trend-busting 16% to £1.14m from £983,000.

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Lawyers On Demand looks beyond City with regional launch

Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP)’s spin-off lawyer contracting service Lawyers on Demand (LoD) is set to launch its first hub outside of London in Manchester, after BLP in March announced it would open an office in the UK’s second largest legal market.

LoD, which was launched by BLP in 2007 but hived off into a separate company in 2012, is recruiting local legal staff ahead of the Manchester launch in the autumn of 2014. LoD will initially launch the service as a pilot, offering organisations across the North West access to local, qualified freelance lawyers on ‘secondment style’ arrangements.

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Law Society pays £1m recruitment bill as Norton Rose receives £435k

The Law Society paid out approaching £1m in recruitment fees over ten months in 2013, as Norton Rose Fulbright (NRF) took the lion’s share of disclosed legal fees for that period, standing at almost £450,000, the body’s latest accounts reveal.

Recruiter Michael Page took home £919,919 in the ten months to October 2013, a 41% uptick on fees paid in the whole of 2012, when the figure was £654,555.

The fees are listed in the Law Society Group (LSG)’s latest financial accounts published in early June, with the 2013 financial period shortened to October in order to align it with the payment of practising certificate fees.

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RPC in talks with breakaway Edwards Wildman partners alongside Cooley and Foley & Lardner

RPC is in talks with a potential breakaway group of Edwards Wildman Palmer City partners – made up of corporate partners Niall McAlister, Eero Rautalahti, Stuart Blythe, and insurance and reinsurance partner David Kendall – alongside California-headquartered Cooley and top-60 Global 100 US firm Foley & Lardner.

The formerly five-strong splinter group is down to four after Shawn Atkinson, who served as co-chair of Edwards Wildman’s venture capital group, resigned in June to go to Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.

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Profile: Carol Hui – Heathrow Airport Holdings

Heathrow’s legal chief on early responsibility, legal satnavs and runway three.

While most general counsel (GCs) at major companies will talk of the attraction of getting close to the business, in a highly varied career Heathrow Airport Holdings legal head Carol Hui really can claim to have been at the corporate coalface for years.

The Slaughter and May-trained lawyer has amassed a huge range of experience since moving to British Gas in a senior corporate role at a time when female lawyers in influential roles were rare in private practice, let alone industry. Continue reading “Profile: Carol Hui – Heathrow Airport Holdings”

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Silver linings playbook: can Norton Rose Fulbright bring its disputes team into the global elite?

Sarah Downey assesses the post-merger state of NRF’s dispute resolution practice

With Norton Rose Fulbright (NRF)’s eye-catching union now over a year old, the top ten UK firm has achieved the enviable feat of creating, through a succession of global bolt-ons, a 3,800-lawyer firm with $1.9bn in revenue, almost without fallout.

Its 138-fee-earner (excluding trainees) City dispute resolution practice is something of an exception, having lost a handful of its star players, including Dorian Drew, adviser to ex-Barclays’ chief executive Bob Diamond on the Libor scandal, who last year left for Clifford Chance.

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Bird & Bird secures dual Indonesia tie-up in continued Asia push

Bird & Bird has signed strategic co-operation agreements with two Indonesian law firms, intellectual property specialists K&K Advocates and business law firm Nurjadin Sumono Mulyadi & Partners (NSMP).

The agreements, which were signed on 24 June in Jakarta, come as the top-20 firm, which already has a presence in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore, experiences a period of rapid growth in the Asia-Pacific region stemming back 18 months.

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Life during law: Charles Martin


In the end Macfarlanes’ response to the recession was very strong. We learned not to be frightened of change and our powers embraced this in a way which was very invigorating… I wish we’d responded a little sooner. But we got there and I’m proud of what we achieved.

The firm got its mojo back. That wasn’t a given. We were phenomenally successful – we were a deal machine and managed to adapt in a way that the mix of the practice today is quite different to six years ago.

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City firms support diversity targets by committing to female partnership ratio

With private practice diversity statistics still often trailing their clients, last month saw rhetoric translated into targets at Ashurst and Linklaters, as they became the latest City law firms to commit to a female partnership ratio.

Linklaters is the third Magic Circle firm, after Allen & Overy (A&O) and Clifford Chance, to set itself targets, declaring that 30% of all partner promotions will be women by 2018, while its female management roles will double within the same time frame.

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Q&A with Blake Morgan’s Walter Cha

The merger between Blake Lapthorn and Morgan Cole went live on 1 July to create Blake Morgan. The firm’s managing partner, Walter Cha, talks competition and strategy.

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How did the merger come about and what are the reasons behind it?

We both acted for common clients and a lot of people were known to each other. We have a partnership at Blake Lapthorn and Morgan Cole that are ambitious and want to see themselves grow rather than wait for other things to impact on them.

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Ceasefire or guerrilla skirmishes – Ashurst struggles to reconcile its post-merger factions

Jaishree Kalia reports on the uneasy peace still hanging over the post-merger Ashurst

It’s been over eight months since Charlie Geffen, the high-profile head of Ashurst, suffered a bruising leadership defeat to litigator Ben Tidswell (pictured) in the wake of the City firm’s merger vote with its Australian partner.

There was no doubt the election defeat of the strong-willed Geffen, who divided the City firm’s partnership into staunch supporters and embittered opponents, and the legacy of its merger with Australian leader Blake Dawson had unsettled the firm. The discharge of Geffen as the ‘war-time’ leader who carried the firm’s strategy and brand through the post-Lehman years is still hard to take for some, while the merger has not convinced everyone. The somewhat ill-tempered resignation in November of highly rated corporate co-head Stephen Lloyd for Allen & Overy (A&O) was an all-too visible sign of that tension – and the lack of engagement felt by the ‘boys’ club’ in Ashurst’s corporate finance teams.

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Hostile takeovers globally at highest value since May 2007

Increase in bids raises hopes of a rise in UK M&A work

M&A partners are predicting that the UK could soon see an increase in lucrative hostile takeovers after the first five months of this year saw unsolicited bids globally hit their highest value since May 2007, standing at a total of $273.4bn.

Bids, whether pending, completed, withdrawn or rejected, are up significantly on the $70.6bn announced in 2013, according to figures from Dealogic, largely driven by Pfizer’s unsuccessful $122.6bn approach for the UK’s AstraZeneca, announced on 2 May, in what is the third largest hostile M&A bid on record.

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Global 100 Overview – Superman Returns

Although the global recession laid many of the world’s leading law firms low for a time, this year’s Global 100 sees a return to form for some storied players. Legal Business discovers which firms have found their powers again.

It has been a rough few years for the supermen and women of the world’s largest law firms. While the disputes and insolvency markets have soared since the 2008 banking crisis, the big name transactional lawyers who had driven their firms’ growth for the preceding two decades faced a prolonged period where their powers and status faded as confidence ebbed from Western markets.

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Mobile cyber-security – Pay as You Go

Mobile technology has enabled today’s lawyers to be more responsive to clients’ needs than ever before but brings added risk of cybersecurity breaches. How are law firms coping with the threats?

Our recent risk management survey, published in March, provided an insight into the level of concern that breaches of IT and data security raise within law firms. Every year since 2008, our annual survey has identified IT/data security breaches as the most significant threat to law firms in terms of actual damage caused and the likelihood of that damage occurring. No firm has fallen foul of a serious reported breach to date but some anecdotal horrors recounting the blasé approach of some lawyers to holding sensitive client data on mobile devices suggests such an outcome is merely a matter of time.

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Marking your own homework: Dentons and a defence of PEP

Alex Novarese takes a jaded view of the latest attempt to avoid transparency

It would almost be too easy to pick holes in the letter that Dentons has supplied to the media to justify its attempt to withhold its profits on the basis of Olympian high principle. But I won’t let that stop me.

The letter, authored by Dentons’ chief executive Elliott Portnoy and chair Joe Andrew, sets out a number of arguments as to why Dentons won’t disclose basic information on the profitability and the margins on which it operates. Without exception, they lack substance, though to varying degrees. Indeed, it’s notable that Dentons largely fails to make any of the credible arguments for not supplying figures on profit per equity partner (PEP).

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Global 100 Choice of Law – Clash of the Titans

In the global market, there remain two great powers: English and New York law. While US law has gained an edge in recent years, the debate continues over which will emerge victorious.

The popularity of English law is one of the UK’s most enduring sources of soft power, having underpinned the huge global success of London’s law firms and projected British influence for hundreds of years. And yet it is rarely commented on.

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Global 100 Regional View – Emerging Powers

2014 is the first year since 2007 that western jurisdictions were not comprehensively outclassed by emerging markets. But Legal Business finds the siren call of eastern economies is still too hard to resist for most Global 100 firms.

‘Nothing appears to have changed in the way firms move in and out of markets,’ reflects Norton Rose Fulbright chief executive Peter Martyr. ‘When it’s good, the Wall Street firms come in sharp and fast with a big chequebook and withdraw quickly when it’s bad. The global firms, on the other hand, take the pain over a much longer period.’

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