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Litigation group Proven appoints David Gold to board

Litigation support business, Proven, had hired former Herbert Smith senior partner Lord David Gold as its chairman.

Gold, who currently runs litigation advisory firm David Gold & Associates, will sit on Proven’s board, which includes former BP general counsel and executive vice president Peter Bevan, and former Director of Public Prosecutions River Glaven QC.

London and New York-based Proven, part of the three-fold Good Governance Group, supports litigation and dispute resolution teams involved in high value multi-jurisdictional cases, as well as specialist services in e-discovery and digital forensics.

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Osborne Clarke retracts bulk of outsourced staff four years after deal

Osborne Clarke (OC) is set to withdraw the majority of its outsourced staff from provider Integreon and bring them back in-house four years after initially striking the deal.

The firm will transfer roughly 65 of the 75 support staff, who were first assigned to Integreon in 2009, back to its offices, with two jobs thought to be at risk. The original deal was intended to last for seven years.

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Withers and Speechly Bircham set to merge

Private client leaders Speechly Bircham and Withers are set to merge, potentially creating a 600-lawyer, £170m practice that will fit easily into the top 25 of the Legal Business 100.

News of the union was revealed by RollonFriday on 22 March. On paper the union would make strategic sense. The two firms have almost identical profit margins (Speechly 20%; Withers 21%), although Withers has a considerably higher profit per lawyer of £72,000 to Speechly’s £46,000.

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CMS to reduce scope of Integreon outsourcing agreement

CMS Cameron McKenna is to scale back its staff outsourcing agreement with Integreon just three years into its ten-year contract.

The news comes four days after Osborne Clarke confirmed it will dramatically reduce its own use of the outsourcing provider.

Duncan Weston, CMS managing partner, today (28 March) confirmed that the firm is considering turning to an alternative provider for facility services currently provided by Integreon but would not provide any detail of how many staff would be affected or the name of the third party provider.

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Ready for his close up

Outspoken, opinionated and often right, K&L Gates head Peter Kalis has made financial transparency his latest mission. Legal Business talks to the Rhodes Scholar who runs a $1bn firm yet still can’t fit into the US legal establishment

‘I was embarrassed to be in the same profession as Dewey & LeBoeuf,’ states Peter Kalis, not without a sense of the dramatic. The chairman and global managing partner of K&L Gates is referring to the circumstances in which the aforementioned Wall Street giant last year became the largest-ever legal collapse amid acrimony and controversies over financial reporting.

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Setting the heather on fire

Our Management Partner of the Year, Bill Drummond, begins his fifteenth year running Brodies in May. We track his firm’s success amid a turbulent Scots market and ask if Brodies’ rise signals the decline of the country’s traditional elite

Bill Drummond wore his trade mark kilt as he stepped up to be named Management Partner of the Year at the Legal Business Awards in February. The attire was fitting, not because Brodies’ longstanding head is a staunch nationalist, but rather because Drummond has led his firm to startling success on the back of an unashamed focus on his home field.

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Generation game

International wealth preservation and succession planning is now a core component of most successful private client practices. Legal Business assesses how far firms will go to keep it in the family

If innovation is a measure of how competitive London’s private client market has become, then the contest for top spot has only intensified over the past year. With London seen as a safe haven for many of the world’s high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), the question for the capital’s leading private client practices is how to develop an edge over the competition. Strategies include international expansion, rare lateral hires, and offering entirely new service lines – all illustrating that private client lawyers have needed to adapt to a swiftly evolving and increasingly global market.

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Israel – New Heights

Tel Aviv buildings at night

In a Tel Aviv conference in June this year, DLA Piper, White & Case, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Weil, Gotshal & Manges will rub shoulders with Israel’s legal elite in discussing the liberalisation and internationalisation of the country’s legal market. The conference, hosted by the Tel Aviv District Israel Bar Association and legal marketing and consulting company Robus, highlights the growing presence of international law firms in Israel. And while this may bear all the hallmarks of another instance of empire building by international advisers, the reality is actually a little more nuanced.

Israel may have only just liberalised its legal market to allow foreign entrants – through an order passed by the Israeli finance minister in August 2012 – but many firms have long been present in the jurisdiction unofficially. Regardless of whether the liberalisation process will fundamentally alter the state of the market or not, there is concern about its effect on the domestic Bar, which is already saturated by highly qualified Israeli lawyers, including immigrants who previously practised overseas.

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Risk management and professional indemnity survey 2013: Getting it Right

Following successive years of regulatory change, including the introduction of outcomes-focused regulation, COLPs and COFAs, risk teams are now in a phase of assimilating those changes. Legal Business tracks progress so far

After five years of reporting on the torrent of regulatory change that has swept through law firms, this year’s Legal Business/Marsh risk management and professional indemnity survey finds risk managers within law firms looking to assimilate those changes. In our sixth annual report on the market, the buzzword is ‘embedding’ – ensuring the upheaval caused by the introduction of outcomes-focused regulation (OFR) and the new high-profile risk management roles (the compliance officer for legal practice (COLP) and the compliance officer for finance and administration (COFA)) are properly implemented.

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Risk management and professional indemnity survey 2013: Same Old Fears

Despite renewed focus on outcomes-focused regulation, IT security and conflicts remain the key threats keeping risk teams awake at night.

This section of the report analyses the likely impact of various risk scenarios on law firms and the likelihood of those situations occurring. Typically those situations that potentially have the most serious impact on a firm’s business are the least likely to occur, and vice versa. ‘Legal Risk Profile’ tables show the mean scores for impact and potential as separate indices.

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Risk management and professional indemnity survey 2013: Finding the Balance

New reporting requirements under the SRA’s outcomes-focused regulations have put additional pressure on risk teams’ resources but finding the right individuals for the new COLP and COFA roles has been the top priority.

Risk teams have been pulled in many directions in the last few years but top of their agenda throughout 2012 was going through the process to appoint the compliance officer for legal practice (COLP) and the compliance officer for finance and administration (COFA). The new roles were introduced as part of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)’s push into outcomes-focused regulation (OFR) but for some the process has been painful and protracted, while some firms were still waiting for the individuals they nominated for the COLP role to be approved.

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Risk management and professional indemnity survey 2013: Counting the Cost

While the end of the assigned risks pool may encourage more insurers into the market, professional indemnity insurance for law firms is as competitively priced as ever.

As law firms experience constant pressure to rein in costs, the pricing of professional indemnity insurance (PII) is high on the agenda. As PII is typically law firms’ third-largest expense, after staff and premises, that 76% of respondents said that they found PII generally to be reasonably priced (a marginal increase on 71% last year) is good news for firms generally. But despite widespread reports of an increasingly soft market, the number of respondents saying their insurance is over-inflated has increased from 7% to 17%.

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Europe in Union

The ravages of the global recession and the European sovereign debt crisis have threatened to turn the long boom law firms have enjoyed into a painful bust. But Europe’s resilient full-service firms are weathering the storm, and many are finding that economic turmoil is bringing opportunities as well as challenges.

In law’s long boom years, it seemed to many that the bumper revenues and profits from an ever-rising tide of transactions would last forever; there was always another wave of deals to be done. But since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and the global financial crisis, law firms that once thrived on a seemingly insatiable demand for everything M&A have faced the painful realisation that this lucrative era is over.

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Switzerland – Being Prepared

Swiss arny knife

In most markets, it wouldn’t qualify as news but in the conservative Swiss legal community, the creation last April of Meyerlustenberger Lachenal via a merger between Zürich’s meyerlustenberger and Geneva’s Lachenal & Le Fort is still making waves. Currently listed as one of the largest law firms in Switzerland, it is present in Zug, Lausanne and Brussels, in addition to Zürich and Geneva.

The roots of Lachenal & Le Fort date back to 1882, while meyerlustenberger was established in 1975. According to Christophe Rapin – a Lausanne-based partner at the combined firm – an important driver behind the merger, which created a 30-partner practice, was to ensure national coverage of the Swiss market, particularly for the firm’s international clientele.

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Litigation market polarised as Jackson reforms take effect

With the Jackson reforms recently instigated, the market is divided about how the introduction of damages-based agreements (DBAs) will impact the litigation market.

Under the reforms, which came into effect on 1 April, litigators will be allowed to accept cases under DBAs for the first time. However, litigators say the lack of clarity about how the new rules work will inhibit their use.

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Latest US profits show positive early signs

The initial numbers to emerge from the US reporting season indicate a relatively resilient performance in 2012 for the world’s largest legal market.

A series of firms have so far posted headline financial results, including Latham & Watkins, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and White & Case, with the majority achieving growth in profits and fee income.

Latham reported growth of 3.4% with the top five US firm’s revenue hitting $2.23bn, up from $2.15bn for the 2011 year. PEP also grew 7.4% to $2.44m and the firm reported an increase of 2.4% in revenue per lawyer, which hit $1.1m in 2012.

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Insolvency teams line up on high-profile failures

With HMV, Jessops and Blockbuster all entering into administration in the first few weeks of 2013, leading City firms have scored significant instructions.

Linklaters is involved in the administration of HMV, with restructuring and insolvency partners Richard Hodgson and Richard Bussell taking the lead. Linklaters had also been advising the lenders, The Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group, to HMV Group since the beginning of 2011 and banking partner Chris Howard continues to advise the lenders. Continue reading “Insolvency teams line up on high-profile failures”

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DWF looks to acquire a stricken Cobbetts in pre-pack deal

DWF is set to acquire Cobbetts in a pre-pack deal, after the struggling Manchester-based firm called in administrators KPMG last month.

The top 40 UK firm announced its intentions to acquire Cobbetts almost a year after merger attempts by the two firms failed. At the time, a joint statement said talks had finished because of ‘continuing uncertain market conditions’.

Under the agreement, DWF will take on 419 staff, including partners, from the fallen firm in Leeds, Manchester, London and Birmingham. The DWF deal does not include Cobbetts’ debt recovery team, Incasso, while Walker Morris has taken the firm’s 24-strong financial litigation team.
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Barclays begins search for new general counsel

Barclays, one of the UK’s largest banks, has started its hunt for a new general counsel (GC) following the retirement of Mark Harding.

Harding’s decision to step down was announced in early February and comes after ten years at the bank. In a statement, the bank’s chief executive Antony Jenkins said that the rationale behind the move was ‘grounded in wanting to do what is best for the bank’.

Barclays is now looking for someone to replace Harding and to head up its group in-house department, which has over 200 lawyers. Because of the seniority of the role, Barclays said the process could take a considerable amount of time, however speculation is already rising over where the bank will find its next recruit. Continue reading “Barclays begins search for new general counsel”