‘There is a real mismatch in how gloomy the economy feels and how busy the legal professional feels,’ observes Deborah Finkler, Slaughter and May’s managing partner. ‘We’re incredibly busy and it wouldn’t surprise me that in the similar conversations you’re having with other managing partners, they will say the same. Th ere is just a lot of work.’ Continue reading “Turning tides”
Hogan Lovells’ London M&A partner Ben Higson has been appointed as Vinson & Elkins’ London head of corporate.
He takes up the role after 15 years at Hogan Lovells, including eight years as head of the corporate team. He also served as an elected member of the firm’s global management board between 2014 and 2020.
Tax lawyers across the country have been on high alert in recent months amid the chaos caused by the disastrous mini-budget unveiled by now-former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng at the end of September. Continue reading “The top firms for tax: The Legal 500 United Kingdom rankings analysis”
There is a financial focus to this week’s round up, with investment funds, debt finance and financial services regulation among the targeted areas both in the City and internationally.
King & Spalding stood out among the City elite, as it recruited partner Stephen Sims into its London private funds and alternative capital team. Joining from management consultant MJ Hudson, Sims previously led the European investment management team at Skadden and advises on fund formation as it relates to private equity, real assets, infrastructure and energy funds, in addition to fund-related M&A transactions.
Lawyers from Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF), Davis Polk and Eversheds Sutherland have earned advisory roles on the administration and £3.4m sale of online retailer Made.com to Next.
Last week, Made.com filed notice of its intention to appoint administrators, which saw HSF drafted in. The HSF team was led by London restructuring partner John Chetwood with corporate support from fellow London partners Ben Ward and Caroline Rae. Since the administration, 320 Made.com jobs have been axed as the company has collapsed.
Dubai partner Edmund Boyo and London partner Adrian Cartwright have stepped forward to challenge Clifford Chance’s (CC) incumbent senior partner Jeroen Ouwehand, three years into his four-year term.
Structured finance specialist Boyo is well-regarded for his successful role as managing partner of the firm’s Dubai office. A CC lifer, he trained in the London office and spent 16 years in Frankfurt before relocating to Dubai in 2017.
Continue reading “Two step up to challenge Ouwehand as CC senior partner vote looms”
This week’s lateral recruitment round-up has an international flavour as firms make key hires at home and abroad.
In the City, Anneliese Foster has re-joined Allen & Overy from Goldman Sachs, where she spent eight years as a managing director. Foster previously spent a decade at the magic circle firm, most recently as a senior associate, and brings broad experience covering real estate credit and assets, infrastructure debt transactions and holdco financings. Continue reading “Revolving doors: A&O and CMS hire in-house talent as gunnercooke launches stateside”
Linklaters has elected its head of real estate in France, Françoise Maigrot, as its new managing partner in Paris. Taking over from banking, energy and infrastructure head Bertrand Andriani, Maigrot will begin her four-year term on 1 January 2023.
Speaking to Legal Business, Maigrot outlined her priorities on assuming the role: ‘One is having a Paris office that is really outward facing and growing at the top of the market, making sure we are taking advantage of all our strengths, including our cross-practice nature. There are very few firms based in Paris that have our breadth of expertise or our European network. Continue reading “‘People are our biggest asset’: Linklaters’ incoming Paris head Maigrot outlines strategy”
When Legal Business last took a deep dive into the firm’s then ‘unrivalled financial success’ in 2016, the entrepreneurial reputation of the Mishcon brand took centre stage. For this, the then managing partner Kevin Gold (pictured) and marketing maverick Elliot Moss were largely credited. ‘Mishcon has continually broken from the pack, often in a colourful style that made legal glamour brands like Olswang look about as edgy as Linklaters,’ LB proclaimed in the feature.
At the time, the firm had broken from the pack to pursue high-profile litigation over transactional work. With an enviable list of instructions that included the divorce and estate of Princess Diana, Mishcon was then representing a group claim spearheaded by businesswoman Gina Miller challenging the triggering of the article 50 notice to leave the EU. The firm regularly attracted plaudits for taking on David versus Goliath cases and creating an innovative, collaborative environment. Nearly six years ago, Gold mused: ‘Mishcon is like being at uni but you get paid for it.’ Continue reading “LB100: Mishcon profile – All that glisters is not Gold”
The genuine regret with which numerous market commentators and former partners talk of Ince’s downfall arguably bears testament to the firm’s historic repute. Many remember the controversial rescue deal which saw listed firm Gordon Dadds snap up Ince & Co in 2019 as part of a pre-pack administration. As one rival shipping partner recalls: ‘When the news broke, there were quite a few people on my floor in the shipping market and they were upset about what they saw as the collapse of an institution.’
Neither Ince nor the market were under any illusions. This was very much a rescue deal, not the culmination of a longstanding strategy. A few months after the deal, a scathing March 2019 administrator report from Quantuma found that the Ince business would have collapsed just weeks later had the deal not gone through. It noted that the equity partners had ‘no appetite’ to step in and raise £8.5m in additional capital to save the firm. Responding to the report at the time, Ince’s then managing partner in Germany, Jan Hungar, conceded: ‘This demonstrates what we said at the time of the acquisition, that the deal with Gordon Dadds was essential to ensure that Ince continued to operate and enable us to grow.’
Notwithstanding the inherent high-risk nature of the buyout (Gordon Dadds’ business model rests on acquiring distressed businesses), the outcome has been far from ideal. This year alone, Ince Gordon Dadds has been a near permanent fixture in the headlines – and often for the wrong reasons. As one City managing partner grimly notes: ‘Unfortunately, you get remembered for your last headline. You don’t want people to think you have a culture problem.’
The year started slowly for Ince after the £10m buyout of mid-cap investment banking company (and its own corporate adviser) Arden Partners was stalled by regulatory constraints, with the process dragged out for months from January to April.
Then came a downbeat set of financial results in May 2022, albeit arguably due to circumstances outside the firm’s control. A significant cyber attack in March, which was later estimated to have cost the business £5m, was cited as a major factor in its revenue slipping 3% from £100.2m to £97m.
Ince also partly attributed the downturn to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which it claimed affected global shipping, ‘a key market for us’. Further, Covid was highlighted as a major factor, ‘impacting the UK market from the end of November 2021’, as well as the firm’s offices in China.
The year has also featured an unedifying series of gaffes. In May, Ince attracted unwanted attention after a group of its lawyers was accused of acting inappropriately in a Cardiff eatery. Cora restaurant owner Lee Skeet alleged in an email that the group had ‘talked down to, disrespected, and touched unwantedly’ a 22-year-old waitress named Lily.
Then over the summer, the firm owned up to a pensions payment blunder which saw Ince pay pension contributions into the wrong account, for which the cyber attack was allegedly to blame.
Such was the damage that, in July, Ince stated it needed to raise £8m to avoid ‘financial difficulties’. The firm also parted ways with chief executive Adrian Biles, previously the managing partner of Gordon Dadds, who guided the firm through its float before acquiring Ince. Biles was replaced by Donald Brown, formerly chief executive of acquired business, Arden.
In August the firm managed to raise £9.5m through the sale of shares, and in September Ince announced it was removing a £2.9m payment from its balance sheet via the sale of one of its businesses, tax consultancy CW Energy.
While these prudent financial measures may have steadied the ship, they were overshadowed by the news in September that Biles was being ousted altogether. An ominously-worded RNS statement read that Biles had ‘been removed as a director of the company with immediate effect, as a result of circumstances which may give rise to a conflict of interest between Adrian Biles and the company’.
The firm has not expanded on the opaque statement, but market commentators have their theories. One ex-partner describes Biles as a ‘difficult figure’ guilty of ‘leadership and strategic failures’, ultimately undermining what was a popular decision to float. The former partner elaborates: ‘When a problem arises you can either take a constructive approach or you can be difficult, and he went for the latter.’ A rival shipping partner simply states: ‘I don’t think Biles was the best thing for them.’
In September, Ince announced it had settled claims with both Adrian Biles and former finance head John Biles. As per the settlement, all parties waived their claims against one another, and the duo paid £670,000 to the firm, while Ince paid £690,000 to both ‘relating to claims for loss of office, rent and other expenses’. It was announced that a further £15,000 would be paid to both ‘for loss of office and their interests in shares in the company’.
‘The strategy was a good one but there were problems of execution. Once that happens, I’m afraid in any corporate it will get to a position where you have to have a change of management.’
John Llewellyn-Lloyd, Arden Partners
Hardly surprising then that the firm has endured cultural reversals during this challenging year. One rival partner paints a picture of fiefdoms: ‘Ince has some big personalities who bring in a lot of profit. As such, I hear the firm is pretty lax in terms of oversight. In any case it’s not a happy ship.’
Perhaps inevitably, these tensions have amounted to departures – nine partners have left the firm since March. Now, market commentators question the calibre of those remaining. One partner at a rival shipping firm notes: ‘Some people were tied down after the listing for a period of time but I don’t think the good ones stayed long after. There’s not much quality left. They probably promised a lot in terms of associate pay, but let’s just say we see a lot of CVs.’
Despite the gloom, there is optimism to be found. Some have praised the firm for what can be viewed as a necessary and brave leap into the public markets, a desperate attempt to save jobs and preserve the Ince brand. One managing partner is keen to remind detractors that listing is not just a flight of fancy: ‘I can understand why people would describe it as “the death of an institution” but you have to give the firm credit for breaking the norm. They clearly thought [the Gordon Dadds deal] would give them a way of breaking that perception. You have to have a good strategy to sell to investors, going through the process almost validates itself.’
And many agree that, on paper at least, there was a convincing pitch to investors. John Llewellyn-Lloyd, joint head of corporate finance at float adviser Arden Partners, recalls the Ince pitch as ‘a cross-selling strategy’. He adds: ‘They were very much in the middle of the market seeking to grow and develop, and they were going to use the capital to do that.’
But ultimately, Llewellyn-Lloyd concurs with the prevailing sentiment that good strategy combined with poor leadership only gets you so far: ‘’The key point was with the benefit of hindsight, the strategy was a good one, but there were problems of execution. And then, once that happens, I’m afraid in any corporate it will get to a position where you have to have a change of management.’
As one former Ince partner concludes: ‘The deal could have worked, but Covid came along and then there were the leadership issues. It’s difficult to point to one specific factor, but if you asked me what I would have done differently, it would require an entire book to explain.’
Ince did not respond to requests for comment. LB
‘I don’t think you will get any of the City firms to talk about this sort of thing… You have? Well. I am astonished. It is one thing for the Americans and accountants to get into this sort of thing, but not the lawyers.’
‘Anyone who gives you that information will be booted out of the partnership.’ Continue reading “Still vulgar to talk about money? Three decades have made the industry less coy”
‘Thirty years ago, the legal press didn’t exist,’ says Pinsent Masons managing partner John Cleland. ‘Deals were sometimes reported and occasionally they would find their way into the newspaper – but very rarely would the law firm’s name be mentioned. Now firms and the legal press have a very active dialogue on things, ranging from analysis to commentary on trends. We never had that thirty years ago.’
Indeed, much has changed in the 30 years since Legal Business first asked firms to cough up their financial results. And calling it the LB100 then would have been wildly inaccurate, what with the first report only including some 35 firms. It was not until the following year that the report graduated into a truer reflection of the business of law. Continue reading “30 years of LB100 – 1992-2002: Teen spirit”
More so than the decades which came before or followed, the years between 2002 and 2012 are defined as a stark binary between boom and bust for LB100 firms.
For many current law firm leaders who practiced throughout that decade (some of whom had just started their careers), the early 2000s was an intrepid time characterised by globalisation, with some firms more successful than others at embedding their brand across borders. Continue reading “30 years of LB100 – 2002-12: A decade of two halves”
It is always educational and entertaining to view how the industry has evolved through the eyes of those veterans who lived it, and this – the 30th anniversary of the LB100 – presented the perfect opportunity to do that.
Some of the recollections from pundits on the 1990s speak of a time that appears far more archaic than seems likely of a mere three decades ago. RPC managing partner James Miller’s observation is a case in point: ‘When I joined RPC in 1995, we had a bunch of disconnected terminals, and we still had typewriters. You could also still smoke in the office – we had enormous ashtrays everywhere!’ Continue reading “30 years of LB100 – So much has changed but also shades of déjà vu”
The firms that appear in the Legal Business 100 (LB100) are the top 100 law firms in the UK (usually LLP partnerships but also some alternative business structures), ranked by gross fee income generated over the financial year 2021/22 – usually 1 May 2021 to 30 April 2022. We call these the 2022 results. Where firms have identical fee incomes, the firms are ranked according to highest profit per equity partner (PEP). Continue reading “LB100: Methodology and notes”
If you only read the stats, you would be forgiven for thinking that the LB100’s 26-50 group has struggled this year. The numbers are uncharacteristically grim for the second quartile: profit per lawyer (PPL) dipped 8% from £79,000 to £73,000 and profit per equity partner (PEP) dropped 3% to £633,000.
Revenue metrics are more favourable – average turnover grew a solid 8% to £167m from £154.7m, while revenue per lawyer (RPL) was up 6% from £273,000 to £290,000. However, this pales in comparison to the blistering growth of the LB100’s top 25, and is a far cry from last year’s eye-catching 19% hike in PEP among the 26-50 group. Continue reading “LB100: The second 25 – Off the pace”
For the 23 City and boutique firms that fall into the second 50 in this year’s LB100, average turnover is up 11% to £53.4m, marking the largest growth across all groups.
‘A couple of years ago people were saying it was the death of the mid-market. We don’t buy that. We think that the mid-market is alive, strong and kicking,’ says Fladgate’s managing partner Grant Gordon. Continue reading “LB100: The second 50: City and Boutique – Living for the city”
The 27 regional and national firms occupying the 51-100 spots in this year’s LB100 come in with an average of 267 lawyers and 27 equity partners. But despite weathering Covid well, with average revenue increases of 11% and 13% in 2020 and 2021 respectively, our 2022 report sees growth flatten out, with average revenue up just 4% to £54.9m.
Alongside static revenues, profit per lawyer (PPL) fell 5% with average lawyer numbers up 7%. Meanwhile, although firms managed to make profit per equity partner (PEP) gains — with the average up 14% to £402,000, outpacing last year’s already robust 8% hike — this is coupled with a 10% decrease in average equity partner numbers. Continue reading “LB100: The second 50: Regional view – Steadying the ship”
