Catrin is the editor of The Lawyer.
The iron law of the legal market is that the accountants don’t know how to grow a legal business. In 2002, three accountancy-tied law firms – K-Legal (KPMG), Garretts (Andersen Legal) and Landwell (PwC) collectively turned over £82.1m. That represented just 1 per cent of the entire revenues of the top UK100 firms, but at […]
Cravath Swaine & Moore has mounted a dramatic build-out of its English law debt finance practice in London with the hire of two Linklaters partners. Rohan Saha and Chris Medley are set to join the conservative New York firm as the 13th and 14th English lawyers in London. They will join partners Korey Fevzi and […]
GCs at listed companies are under serious costs pressure, creating challenges for their go-to firms
There’s a blockage in the upper mid-market. The firms in the 11-20 ranking of The Lawyer UK200 have averaged 35 per cent growth since 2020, but none of them has broken away from the pack. Ashurst still can’t get over a billion in revenue; Clyde & Co’s takeover of distressed asset BLM solved its gap […]
The skip outside the now-defunct 9 Stone Buildings is a forlorn remnant of a 130-year history. But it’s a gift of a metaphor. Anyone following the shape of legal services will be increasingly aware that chambers’ challenges mimic those of law firms. For 9 Stone Buildings’ fate is the amplification of a trend that is sweeping […]
Freshfields’ new branding, revealed this week by The Lawyer, has attracted plenty of attention for the deletion of its German heritage. But it’s also provoked deep scepticism. Lawyers who can barely use clip art are saying they could do better themselves, which is about as good an idea as getting graphic designers to draft an […]
We hope it wasn’t Simone Biles that elevated Ropes & Gray’s longstanding interest in Paris into something resembling a decision this summer. But it’s certainly suspicious that after years of procrastination, Ropes’s thoughts have turned to France. You wouldn’t have predicted this a couple of months – and a hundred news cycles – ago, when the political […]
If you want a cacophonous, vicious, spectacularly partisan constituency competition, then Siena would have been the place to be this week. You’ll have seen it in Quantum of Solace: the palio – a three-lap horse race in which 10 of the city’s 17 wards, each with their own insignia, compete for glory and bragging rights. […]
In the last 12 months, the top 100 law firms in the UK have spent literally millions on lateral hires, bringing in a total of 12,177 new partners. Such hope. So many dreams. How many of them will actually work out? If you’re assessing return on investment then the usual response is to look at […]
$20m partners are rare, but they are multiplying. Paul Weiss, Kirkland, Davis Polk, Weil Gotshal and latterly Latham are reshaping their partner compensation for the big figure, stretched upwards from the $9m that Paul Weiss paid for Scott Barshay in 2016. As The Lawyer reported yesterday, even Cleary – Cleary! – is now considering it. […]
The scene: A US firm boardroom, somewhere not in New York*. Big Cheese (furiously): ‘We’re not growing fast enough. What have you got?’ Smaller Cheese (panicking): Private equity! That’s the thing! Kirkland! Paul Weiss!’ Big Cheese: ‘Do whatever it takes. And do it now.’ Smaller Cheese: ‘Leave it with me. We’ll hire big in London. […]
It seems that one of the chief attributes of managing partners is wild optimism. You can’t move for law firm leaders committing their firms to hardcore five-year targets – particularly in the upper mid-tier, where we’re hearing of plans to double or even triple revenues by the end of the decade. We’d like some of […]