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Freshfields to provide scholarships for aspiring black lawyers

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer is launching a scholarship with the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust (SLCT) to help students from black and ethnic minorities gain access to the profession.

The scholarship will allow four successful male candidates committed to pursuing a career in the legal profession to receive a £3,500 annual contribution towards living expenses, as well as training, mentoring, work experience at Freshfields and a guaranteed interview for a training contract.

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Rising clout means a new kind of corporate politics for GCs

Oxymoronic as it sounds, news that Barclays general counsel (GC) Mark Harding is to depart has been received as startling and yet not entirely a surprise. Barclays had been engulfed in a series of escalating controversies in recent years spanning mis-selling, tax advice, and – most damagingly – allegations of rigging institutional interest rates. While there has been no suggestion that Harding or Barclays’ legal team shoulders any blame, incoming chief executive Antony Jenkins has gone out of his way to signal a total break with the culture under predecessor Bob Diamond, who last year stood down as the Libor investigation generated a record fine against the bank.

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Legal Business 100 2012: Interactive main table

From merger mania to profit manipulation – the LB100 in 2012 draws on familiar themes from 20 years of law firm financials.

If there’s one thing the last 20 years have taught us at LB, it’s that the legal profession carries on regardless. The UK may have entered into a  double-dip recession despite quantitative easing; the US and a number of European countries may have seen their credit ratings downgraded; M&A may have dried up and the global debt markets may be in stasis, but the UK’s top 100 law firms continue to post record growth and trend-busting profits. The industry has again showed its remarkable resilience and stability.

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Stepping Up – Clifford Chance’s corporate revolution

Clifford Chance’s corporate practice had a stonking year in 2012, rocketing up the league tables and scoring roles on four of the ten largest M&A deals globally. Little wonder Matthew Layton was handed a second four-year term at the helm. Vive la revolution.

By anyone’s measure, Clifford Chance (CC) had a stupendous year for M&A work in 2012, appearing on four of the ten largest deals that took place worldwide and ranking second at year-end by deal value, up from 22nd two years ago. According to mergermarket, CC worked on 197 announced deals with a combined value of £156bn, nudging ahead of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and relegating Linklaters to fifth in the league tables.

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Committed to Crime – boutique firms and White-collar Crime

White-collar crime work was once the comfy preserve of niche London law firms that knew their way around the inside of a police station. Not any more. But as the big international players stake a claim, the boutiques are standing their ground.

When the Bribery Act came into force in July 2011, it shook the world of white-collar crime to its core. In one fell swoop the UK became home to the most stringent legislation combating corruption in the world, going beyond the scope of America’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Its strict measures created a worldwide trend of amplified anti-corruption enforcement, which is now booming in a similar fashion to competition law in the nineties, and the established legal market players found themselves with a fight on their hands.

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Geek Chic – Bristows

Home to more well-mannered boffins in its all-equity partnership than you can shake a stick at and with no international offices, Bristows is an unconventional LB100 hero. LB meets the co-managing partners of the firm that has outclassed many in the last five years.

You know you’re at a different kind of law firm when you discover that every meeting room in Bristows’ offices is named after a famous scientist. On a miserable, wet December morning, co-managing partners Iain Redford (left) and Mark Watts (right) are sitting in a room named after Michael Faraday, who discovered how magnetic forces could affect the flow of an electrical current. It’s appropriate because there’s no denying that the forces at play at Bristows these days are compelling.

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Funding the fights

With litigation funders having established their own industry regulator and starting to move into arbitration cases, there are more reasons to believe that third-party funding is here in a big way

Leslie Perrin, chairman of litigation funder Calunius Capital, remembers the atmosphere in New York during the autumn of 2008 when he was attempting to raise money for Calunius’s inaugural litigation fund. Tumbleweed was rolling down Wall Street and Citigroup’s share price was plunging by the second. It was an inauspicious time for raising capital.

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4-5 Gray’s Inn Square merges with public law specialists Atlas Chambers

4-5 Gray’s Inn Square has merged with Public law set Atlas Chambers in a bid to boost headcount following a swathe of barrister exits late last year.

The tie-up will see Atlas director John Lister and his team of eight barristers move in with 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square, which was hit by the exit of 24 members including seven QCs, in November last year (See: 39 Essex Street takeover heralds new dawn) and a further four clerks earlier this year. Both groups joined 39 Essex Street.

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Freshfields partners with Stephen Lawrence charity to provide scholarships to aspiring black lawyers

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer is launching a scholarship with the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust (SLCT) to help students from black and ethnic minorities gain access to the profession, in the latest of a string of diversity initiatives in law.

The scholarship will allow four successful male candidates committed to pursuing a career in the legal profession to receive a £3,500 annual contribution towards living expenses, training, mentoring, work experience at Freshfields and a guaranteed interview for a training contract.

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Latest Dundas departures are reminder of pressure facing Scotland’s most storied firms

Dundas & Wilson is bracing itself for the departure of three more partners from the firm’s London arm. Corporate partners Julian Matthews and Simon Sale, along with banking and finance partner Michael Wrigley have decided to leave the Scots leader, which has faced a difficult few years by any yardstick.

These moves compound an unsettled time for the firm’s London office, that last year saw Martin Thomas, one of the firm’s top litigators, leave for Wragge & Co, along with banking partner John Pike, who quit for Osborne Clarke. More recent senior departures include TMT partner Paul Graham, who left for Field Fisher Waterhouse, while real estate partner Nick Padget left for Osborne Clarke. Of this month’s departures, it is thought that Wrigley and Matthews will leave immediately, with Sale leaving next month. Familiar questions about the firm’s London ambitions have been raised.

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Cleary and 2012 GC take top prizes in 2013 Legal Business Awards

Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, Linklaters and London 2012’s Terry Miller were among the key prize-winners at last night’s Legal Business Awards.

Cleary Gottlieb was named Law Firm of the Year from a shortlist including Baker & McKenzie, Bristows, Clifford Chance, Clyde & Co, RPC and Travers Smith. The Wall Street leader was singled out for a truly outstanding year, combining cutting-edge mandates such as Greece’s sovereign bond restructuring and advising Rosneft on its $55bn acquisition of TNK-BP, while posting the highest five-year growth rate of any elite global law firm.

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Manchester market takes another hit as Cobbetts seeks saviours

With Manchester-based Cobbetts on the verge of administration, signalling increasingly difficult market conditions in the north, local rivals will surely be able to snap up some bargains and save jobs.

The firm, ranked 62nd in the LB100, announced on 30 January that it was seeking to obtain ‘statutory moratorium to enable a sale of the business and assets of the firm to be concluded in a short time’. The news has sent shockwaves across the legal market and puts Manchester at the epicentre of law firm casualties following the demise of Halliwells in 2010.

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Pay for female lawyers not up by much

Pay for male lawyers in the UK is significantly down from 2011, while women enjoyed a small rise in salary in 2012. Despite this sliver of positive news, the gender imbalance continues with male and female lawyers still receiving dramatically different treatment. The profession still has a long way to go.

Recent research from recruiter Laurence Simons found that average pay for male lawyers – both in-house and in private practice – was down £5,000 on 2011, while pay among female lawyers was up by nearly £1,400. Even considering this feeble rise, men on average in the legal profession made over £50,000 more than women last year. Average salary for male lawyers was £162,689 compared to £111,293 for female lawyers looks pretty bad.

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Lone star state of mind

Reed Smith’s assault on Houston is a brave move following its failed merger with Thompson & Knight three years ago.

The firm launched a greenfield office in downtown Houston last month, where it will fill two floors of the city’s tallest building, the BG Tower, with up to 30 lateral hires over the next quarter. Firmwide managing partner Greg Jordan says Reed Smith has already recruited several partners and associates from leading local firms.

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Offshore: new ground

Guernsey recently passed the world’s first-ever legislation to protect image rights and, following in Jersey and the Isle of Man’s footsteps, the island has introduced a foundations law. LB assesses the reaction from the local legal market

Thanks to new law that came into effect in Guernsey in December, a person or company can now register their image rights. This is the first legislation of its type in the world, allowing individuals to protect voices, expressions, pictures, videos and recordings. A modern, online-specific registry has also been designed for that purpose.

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Offshore: branching out

While fresh legislation is good news for the Cayman Islands’ insurance and reinsurance markets, BVI funds lawyers welcome a new regulatory regime. LB assesses the response from the Caribbean’s top law firms

Significant legislative changes have brought good news to the thriving Caribbean offshore market. After much anticipation, the Cayman Islands Insurance Law 2010 came into force in November, making significant amendments to the current insurance and reinsurance business regime in the islands. The law brings Cayman’s insurance sector in line with international standards and should attract more commercial reinsurers.

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Central and eastern Europe: CEE the light

Sunset

The most recent global deal statistics have shown that the outlook remains pretty dark for the world’s emerging markets. According to figures published by mergermarket, the value of emerging markets deals plummeted by 24.1% in the first three quarters of a2012, down from $386.8bn in 2011 to $293.5bn. Significantly, it’s not simply a result of a drop in worldwide deals. Instead, it seems that investors are specifically turning away from these jurisdictions; emerging markets accounted for 23.5% of deals in 2011, but in the first three quarters of 2012 that fell to 15.8%.

However, this drop has not been reflected in the emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). In fact, the CEE (excluding Russia) is currently the most active M&A region in Europe, with mergermarket counting 789 deals in the first three quarters of 2012. To put those figures into perspective, the Germanic region was second with 691 deals and the UK and Ireland were third with 640. Continue reading “Central and eastern Europe: CEE the light”

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The Legal Business GC Power List 2013

Welcome to our inaugural GC Power List: a collection of 100 of the most interesting and influential in-house lawyers in business today.

This report provides a snapshot of some of the most powerful legal advisers to companies across ten key business sectors. In compiling this report, we spoke to an array of leading law firms that specialise in each industry sector and canvassed the opinion of hundreds of partners. We have not ranked individuals in order of preference, or provided subjective views on ability, but simply identify ten lawyers in each sector that every private practice lawyer should know.

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Jonathan Watmough – RPC

Jonathan Watmough, Managing Partner, RPC

Increasingly I realise just how easy some of us in private practice have it compared to general counsel (GC) and in-house lawyers.

Law firms and their lawyers are inclined to be change resistant. Professional experience has conditioned them to be sensitised to the potential downsides arising from a course of action in preference to embracing the likely upsides. And even when they do accept that change is inevitable, often it’s a painfully slow process to effect – it’s hard enough to halt the progress of a supertanker, let alone change its course.

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