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Details emerge of terms of Cobbetts’ fire sale

DWF acquired Cobbetts’ work in progress (WIP) from KPMG in February for £3.8m as details emerge of the Manchester firm’s fire sale.

KPMG was instructed on 17 January to start administration proceedings, although Cobbetts’ lender, Lloyds TSB, had engaged KPMG in September to formulate contingency plans as the firm was beginning to falter. Continued trading was dependent on the support of Lloyds TSB, which was only prepared to provide monies to pay January wages and other outgoings if Cobbetts granted security.

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BT and Carillion to expand external legal services

BT and Carillion have separately extended their legal arms recently to offer more external legal services.

BT Law launched in early March after the telecoms giant received an alternative business structure (ABS) licence from the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA). BT Law will provide services to customers in the motor claims market and will expand into other areas such as employment law and public liability.

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PROFILE: Tom Kilroy – Misys

The software firm’s legal head shares his unique viewpoint after a temporary stint as chief executive.

Tom Kilroy stands out in several notable regards from the ranks of prominent general counsel (GC). For one, the down-to-earth legal head of software firm Misys is one of a very select band of senior in-house counsel who have turned to social media as a means of communicating with peers.

As such, his ‘GC’s Eye View’ blog has built a considerable audience on the back of witty pieces on the realities of legal practice and the management of an in-house team, though work pressures have meant that in recent months Kilroy has turned more to commenting on the legal industry via Twitter, where he has amassed well over 2,000 followers.

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DWF makes 38 redundancies post Cobbetts pre-pack

Following its acquisition of Cobbetts, DWF has laid off 38 staff from its central services support team following a consultation which ended last Friday (22 March).

DWF initially placed 140 staff under redundancy risk but 83 have now been placed into roles and 21 are still in the selection process.

The firm said the move was ‘inevitable with an acquisition of this size and nature’ and that ‘there was an element of overlap of roles’.

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Top HSF litigator Greeno defects to Quinn Emanuel’s City arm

Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) partners received more bad news this morning as it emerged that top litigator Ted Greeno has resigned to join US disputes leader Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.

The departure represents arguably the most high profile contentious practitioner to join a US law firm in London directly from private practice and will be regarded as highly significant for Quinn Emanuel, which is moving to broaden the practice of its City arm.

Greeno’s resignation was announced this morning (27 March) to HSF’s partnership and comes after almost 30 years with the City firm.

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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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