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In need of sponsors – can a bank-dominated A&O get the hang of this private equity thing?

Jaishree Kalia assesses A&O’s latest attempt to break into the buyout game.

There was never any obvious reason for Allen & Overy (A&O) to largely ignore private equity. While a circular debate simmered in the City about the problems of combining deal finance and corporate, its arch rival Clifford Chance (CC) had long made hay in both leverage finance and private equity. A finance-centric law firm should on paper be in tune with private equity houses, while the lack of a public M&A heritage to rival a Linklaters would suggest the buyout barons would have made good clients to build its corporate brand.

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Always a bridesmaid: can Nabarro revive itself post-Lehman without a partner?

Sarah Downey reports on the property leader’s attempts to position itself.

With its five-year financial performance standing out as one of the worst of the top 50 in last year’s LB100 and at least one abandoned merger talk under its belt, Nabarro is perceived by a number of clients and rivals as a firm in need of change.

Heavily dependent on a mixture of high-end but also commoditised property work, the firm has dropped down the UK legal rankings from its 2008 high, when it stood in 23rd place on the back of a revenue increase of 16% to £142.4m.

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OC joins Magic Circle on Dixons Carphone tie-up

Carphone Warehouse and Dixons merge along with DEMB and Mondelez

Major M&A mandates have over the past month seen Linklaters, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Osborne Clarke (OC) secure roles on the £3.6bn merger of Carphone Warehouse and Dixons Retail, as Clifford Chance (CC) and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom led on the $7bn merger of the coffee businesses of Kraft Foods spin-off Mondelēz International and DE Master Blenders 1753 (DEMB).

UK top-40 firm OC capitalised on its longstanding relationship with Carphone Warehouse to secure a role on its May merger with Dixons, which also owns Currys and PC World. Corporate partner Jonathan King led for OC and told Legal Business: ‘Any merger of this size is complicated when you’re dealing with two FTSE 250 companies coming together.’

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Hogan Lovells second global firm to exit Prague in a month

Transatlantic firm Hogan Lovells has become the second top-ten Legal Business 100 firm in recent weeks to announce it is withdrawing from Prague, blaming difficult market conditions.

Following a ‘strategic review of the market’ undertaken by the international management committee, the firm is aiming to complete its exit from Prague over the summer, with the exact date still to be decided.

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‘The right to be forgotten’: Cleary client Google dealt a blow by ECJ’s privacy ruling

Decision contradicts EU advocate general’s previous non-binding guidance.

After years of attempts by Brussels to tighten up Europe’s data privacy rules in the face of US lobbying, in May the European Court of Justice (ECJ) achieved that effect by backing a ‘right to be forgotten’ against Google, in a blow for the search engine and advisers Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton.

The court in Luxembourg found that in certain circumstances individuals can request that operators remove the links that appear during searches of their name, meaning Google will now need to set up a technical solution to a potential minefield of requests.

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Clyde & Co whistleblower case sees Supreme Court hand partners protection

Partners who expose malpractice in their own law firm will now be protected by whistleblower legislation, the Supreme Court ruled on 21 May, in a precedent-setting judgment that follows a claim brought by former Clyde & Co partner Krista Bates van Winkelhof.

The Supreme Court held – overturning a Court of Appeal finding in 2012 – that members of limited liability partnerships are ‘workers’ for the purpose of employment legislation and therefore have the same protections as employees if they have ‘blown the whistle’ at work.

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Barclays’ Americas chief Michael Crowl set to join UBS

Barclays’ high-profile managing director and general counsel (GC) for the Americas, Michael Crowl, is to head UBS’ US wealth management division, replacing former permanent head Jonathan Eisenberg, who returned to K&L Gates earlier this year.

A spokesperson for Barclays last month confirmed the bank has, until a permanent replacement is announced, put in place two interim heads: New York-based Kevin Genirs and Marcelo Riffaud.

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Sainsbury’s unveils new panel as Lloyds appoints insurance GC

Significant in-house announcements in May saw King & Wood Mallesons SJ Berwin and TLT awarded first-time spots on Sainsbury’s panel, while Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) appointed RSM Tenon’s former group general counsel (GC) Joanne Jolly to lead its insurance group.

Sainsbury’s recently concluded the third review of what it calls its ‘legal community’: a 12-strong collaborative law firm panel, which saw reappointments for Addleshaw Goddard; Bond Dickinson; CMS Cameron McKenna; Croner; Dentons; DWF; Wragge Lawrence Graham & Co; Linklaters; Shepherd and Wedderburn; and Winckworth Sherwood.

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Profile: Simon Dowson-Collins, HarperCollins UK

The media lawyer talks about daytime TV and taking the top spot at the publishing giant.

Although not recommended for your average wannabe general counsel (GC), before rising up to become HarperCollins’ most senior UK lawyer, Simon Dowson-Collins’ in-house career began by watching television during the day.

Formerly with media firm Wright Webb Syrett, which merged with the now defunct Davenport Lyons, Dowson-Collins’ enviable first taste of life on the buy-side was as a media defamation litigator at the BBC, checking programmes such as Have I Got News for You, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and They Think It’s all Over.

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Strategic Recruitment: The Product

The debate over the value of partner recruitment has intensified in recent years. Legal Business analyses hiring trends at top 50 firms and assesses the link between lateral hiring and financial performance

The mixed fortunes of law firms in recruiting partners can be summed up using a simple compare and contrast exercise. Compare the fanfare surrounding Kirkland & Ellis’ May hire of leveraged finance heavyweight Stephen Lucas from Weil, Gotshal & Manges and contrast it with, at the other end of the spectrum, this observation on one top 100 UK firm: ‘A firm can either pay more, or accept someone who is slightly mental but has a book of business. Continue reading “Strategic Recruitment: The Product”

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The last word – strategic recruitment

From disastrous due diligence to delusions of grandeur, leaders from LB100 firms and senior recruitment specialists give their take on making lateral hires work.

Bigger picture

‘Be patient and think long term. Moving firms isn’t easy for anyone. It never works out exactly how you’d planned it and the client market can shift significantly, but if the character fit, quality, strategic fit and business fit were right at the outset, then it should come good in the long term. In the meantime, the profit-sharing system needs the flexibility to accommodate this.  Continue reading “The last word – strategic recruitment”

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Strategic Recruitment: What Lies Beneath

More law firms are formally vetting potential senior recruits. Legal Business investigates the growth – and controversies – of partner due diligence.

The legacy of failed lateral hires can damage reputations and even affect the finances of a firm, and this can be particularly galling when the failure is down to an absence of basic due diligence, or that process is flawed. Even the most established firms can get things badly wrong. One recruitment consultant recalls the time a Magic Circle partner called an old law school colleague for their opinion on a potential candidate. As it turned out, the old school chum was the potential recruit’s current boss.

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The Programme – how Dundas & Wilson fits into the CMS masterplan

With a takeover of Dundas & Wilson under its belt and a barrage of post-Lehman re-engineering in place, CMS Cameron McKenna hopes it can secure its breakthrough globally and at home. LB investigates a complex beast that some of its own partners don’t understand.

On 10 December the London partners of Dundas & Wilson were called home. Given the dramatic nose-dive that had afflicted Scotland’s proudest legal institution in the previous five years, expectations were that this would herald drastic action to revive its fortunes.

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Portugal – A New Hope

Portugal’s European bailout is over and its privatisation programme is winding down. Legal Business asks the country’s lawyers what happens next.

While the instances in which Europe’s ailing economies have been talking up their prospects have been as frequent as rain storms this past year, Portugal has more reason than most to be bullish. It exited the European Union (EU)/International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout programme at the end of last month; activity levels and employment figures are exceeding expectations; and the government aims to reduce the budget gap further in 2015.

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Second Best – The Pros and Cons of Borrowing Your Talent

The secondment has long been leant on by corporates to plug holes in their resources but, as the economy recovers and law firms’ resources become strained, does the model still deliver?

Often billed as a win-win for resource-strapped in-house teams and private practice firms looking to deepen their client relationships, secondments are arguably also a convenient window dressing for clients to get something for nothing in the name of relationship building.

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Life During Law: Nilufer von Bismarck

There were different challenges during the downturn, you had to look to different markets. Challenges are always there and you are always after that next deal or that new client. I don’t think you could be here for 24 years without still being ambitious for that.

Working on the bailout was very intense – almost surreal, sitting in the Treasury trying to figure out how best it should be done. There was a deadline for having to announce something before the markets opened on the Monday. We all started on Saturday morning and worked all the way through to Monday morning. There were three banks we were looking at: RBS, Lloyds and HBOS, and then the Lloyds/HBOS combination. Each had a different thing to think about, they all had their own lawyers so there were three sets of documentation. The challenges faced and the creativity needed to get that off the ground were a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

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DISSENT: A self-deceiving return to business as usual

RSG’s Reena SenGupta argues an improving economic climate is leading top law firms to wrongly assume the ‘new’ normal is the same as the old one

In 2010, Georgetown University, under the direction of Professor Milton Regan, held a conference of academics, practitioners and leading thinkers on the profession. To delegates, the atmosphere was heady; change was palpable in the room.

There were no dissenting voices. People knew that there was no turning back for the legal profession. Legal services would be unbundled, equity structures in law firms would change, clients would exert their buying power and demand radically different fee arrangements, Chinese law firms would stride onto the global stage and new technologies and service providers would fundamentally alter the law firm business model. It was going to be, as the title of the conference predicted, a brave new world.

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