LB100 Osborne Clarke: From South West to West Coast

Twenty years ago, Osborne Clarke (OC) had revenues of £11.4m and an average PEP of £97,000. It was a Bristol firm with a very small London office and the origins of an international alliance.

‘Lots of firms have overtaken us,’ says the current managing partner Simon Beswick, ‘but really OC was the first regional firm to come into London and the first regional firm to go into Europe, doing both of those in 1987.’

It was known for its transactional work, namely IPOs on the Unlisted Securities Market (the precursor to AIM) and mid-market M&A. In Bristol it was viewed as something of an upstart by long-established rivals, including Burges Salmon. ‘Osborne Clarke was formed in the late sixties through the combination of two high-street practices,’ says Beswick. ‘Then it decided it wanted to be the next Slaughter and May.’

A junior Slaughters lawyer by the name of Richard Smerdon had been recruited down to Bristol to build the corporate practice, pretty much from scratch. Despite a pretty woeful first impression – he concluded the client base just wasn’t up to it – Smerdon’s ability to network with local entrepreneurs got the practice off the ground, and in 1987 he moved to London to build that offering, becoming chairman and senior partner of the firm by the time of the first LB100.

In 1996 he recruited a team of four young IT partners into London from Hopkins & Wood, led by Simon Rendell, who is now head of the London office.

With that move, the firm’s focus on digital business was born. Riding on the back of a dotcom boom that the practice was firmly plugged into, OC opened in Reading in 1995 as that became the heart of the UK’s venture capital community, and then in Silicon Valley three years later, to tap into US opportunities. By now Leslie Perrin was managing partner of the business, and Smerdon was sent to Reading and then California to spearhead growth.

It was the Silicon Valley move that set OC apart from the crowd. ‘In the late nineties the technology and internet world was going like the clappers,’ says Beswick. ‘We found that when the Yahoos of this world arrived at Heathrow to start looking at Europe, Osborne Clarke was on the list of 20 firms they called, but we weren’t necessarily that high up. So we thought if we could pick them up before they got on the plane in San Francisco, we would stand a better chance.’

Partners also felt the firm’s position would be more secure with US clients if relationships were built Stateside, instead of being entirely reliant on UK-based personnel. No attempt was made to practise US law, but some of the firm’s best partners were seconded to California, including Beswick, who was there for two years before becoming managing partner in 2003. The office helped the firm win work for Yahoo!, Dell, Electronic Arts and others.

The instructions were flowing and the firm ended the nineties on a high; still a mid-market national law firm, but one with a serious dose of technology work and international clients. And it was making inroads into private equity too, through work for regional clients like 3i and Bridgepoint Capital, both of whom went on to become serious players. The next step was European expansion, which Perrin embraced with gusto, opening in Cologne and Frankfurt and launching the Osborne Westphalen Alliance before the dotcom crash hit hard and expansion ground rapidly to a halt.

Between 1998 and 2003, OC grew from 175 lawyers to 350. ‘We had been building services expecting to be able to sell them and we expected it to keep going,’ says Beswick. ‘It didn’t, and we had to get back to more like 300 lawyers.’

Beswick became managing partner in 2003, taking over from Perrin, who became senior partner. So began the toughest period of the last 20 years at Osborne Clarke, as two things became patently obvious; first, the business was too transactional and needed to find a hedge that would enable it to weather storms better, and second, the focus on digital business was great, but left the firm heavily exposed. In the last decade, litigation has gone from 10% of turnover to 25%, and the sector focus has been expanded to cover three other markets, in financial services, energy, and real estate and infrastructure.

‘Our ambition now is to be square-on competitors to the Silver Circle in our sectors, and to get back to building out OC as an international law firm,’ says Beswick, who this year pulled off mergers with its Spanish and Italian alliance members – adding 21 partners and £117m in revenue to the firm – and moved to create an integrated pan-European offering. ‘What we are doing is looking at the world through the eyes of those sectors and asking, “Where are the key clients and what are the key markets for those clients?”’ he says. Expect more attention to the US and Asia going forward.

Beswick says in many ways the firm has changed beyond recognition since 1992. ‘In our early days it was very entrepreneurial, the new kid on the block and happy to take risks, which was quite unlike a law firm,’ he says. ‘In the last 20 years, it’s had to grow from being a teenager to being a fully fledged adult; from that small team to a larger group of people acting for institutions and bigger clients where consistency of what we do is critical, while trying to keep that entrepreneurial spirit. Although the firm has had its setbacks, that drive and ambition still comes through today.’

People seem to stick around at OC. Smerdon stayed from 1969 to 2000, largely in senior roles, and was succeeded by Chris Curling, who spent 14 years as first managing and then senior partner. Perrin did the same for a decade and now it’s Beswick, who’s been in the role for coming up to ten years. Beswick credits Smerdon with creating the corporate practice, Curling with taking it into London and Europe, and Perrin for ‘growing it so strongly during the boom years’. More focused international growth is now firmly in his sights.