Simon says – DLA Piper gears up for a life after Nigel

DLA Piper pushed its regional brands to unprecedented heights under a trailblazing leader only to hit the inevitable grind of global integration. Legal Business meets the man charged with finishing what Sir Nigel started.

‘I had to ask Nigel to stop referring to his standing down as the firm’s Sir Alex Ferguson moment,’ laughs Simon Levine, the man tasked with replacing one Sir Nigel Knowles. ‘I didn’t want to go the way of Moysey.’

Despite Levine’s protests – and sincere hope of avoiding becoming the legal equivalent of Manchester United’s ridiculed former manager David Moyes – it is easy to see why Knowles made the comparison as he prepared to step down from leading DLA Piper after 18 years at the helm at what became one of the world’s largest law firms.

Ferguson and Knowles both received knighthoods for international success, in the latter’s case creating an 80-office global giant that made DLA Piper the UK’s largest law firm by revenue, and both were natural leaders who moulded their organisations around their vision and personality.

Since taking charge of Dibb Lupton Broomhead in 1996, Knowles transformed a Sheffield-bred law firm pulling in £61.5m a year into a global power with revenues of nearly £1.6bn.

In over two dozen interviews to mark Legal Business’ recent 25-year anniversary, the 59-year-old Knowles was the individual highlighted more than any other as having transformed the profession during that period.

‘The firm has seen things through my eyes for nearly 20 years and that needed to change both for me and the firm,’ says Knowles. ‘You’re always better moving on when you’re doing well, rather than when people start suggesting you should start thinking about something else. I was always keen to restore the firm’s fortunes from the global financial crisis, make sure the firm was in great shape, and then move on.’

Will Levine succeed where Moyes failed? If he’s worried, the veteran intellectual property (IP) litigator hides it well. Though DLA Piper has kept Levine relatively low profile since announcing his appointment as co-chief executive in February 2014, discussing the role in person Levine is an effective mix of self-deprecation, humour and frankness. Indeed, he is as funny as his raconteur predecessor.

‘Nigel is very much an entrepreneur. Wherever Nigel had ended up, whatever his profession, that’s what he would have been,’ says Levine, who took on his role on 1 January 2015 for a four-year term. Knowles has taken on the role of co-chairman – and will replace Tony Angel as senior partner on 1 May 2015.

Still, making good on the DLA vision will take some doing. The firm has long finished its phase of breakneck expansion, with the highpoint being the three-way union of DLA and US duo Piper Rudnick and Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich in 2005. DLA has for years now been locked into the hard slog of integration and delivering the consistency to match its global ambitions. Moreover, the once clear challenger brand has been replaced by a more nuanced – at times less clear – message to clients about where DLA Piper sits.

While the point hasn’t been entirely settled, it is clear from discussions with Levine and the firm’s senior partners that DLA Piper is increasingly moving in the direction of the premium end of the legal market, putting it more closely in competition with traditional global leaders even if DLA is unlikely to ever narrowly style itself as a transactions and disputes shop.

Levine inherits a professional services giant in flux, with partner numbers having fallen for the first time in a decade in 2013 and 2014 being the first year since its US tie-up that DLA Piper did not open an office. Levine sums up: ‘I’ve been a part of this incredible journey for the past decade, so now it’s about taking all the pieces and making sure they are operating efficiently and with consistent quality.’

Necessary? Without a doubt. Easy to turn into a vision? Well, that’s the challenge Levine has set himself.

Frank got a Jag

If some outside the firm were surprised when Levine was named as Knowles’ replacement, the self-confessed IT geek fits the bill for the classic DLA Piper lawyer: comfortable in the City without being quite part of the pack.

Born in Hull in 1965, Levine was not from a typical professional family. His father, a major influence, ran a clothes business in Hull and had worked for many years in the local fish dock, having left school at 14. Levine was academically minded, becoming the first member of his immediate family to go to university when he was offered a place at Cambridge, where he was followed by his younger brother (his grandmother thought Cambridge the ‘only university out there’).

An early passion was history – alongside Latin and Greek – but his father pressed Levine grudgingly towards law. ‘My dad said: “Stop being so ridiculous, no son of mine is going to do a history degree. What sort of job can you get with a history degree?!”’

‘At the time, Rumpole was on a lot so I thought: “I want to do litigation.” The idea of hanging out in wine bars every afternoon was phenomenal.’ It is just as well that he had that career dream to look forward to because studying law was not a blast. ‘It was OK. It wasn’t that exciting, wasn’t as much fun as history and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.’

Levine toyed with a career at the Bar but worried that it would be too lonely. The ideal opportunity emerged in the shape of Frere Cholmeley Bischoff, a 40-partner firm known for its celebrity clientele, unusually mixing media and private client work with corporate clients.

Even in the idiosyncratic world of London law in the late 1980s, Frere stood out, thanks to big personalities such as media lawyer Frank Presland, who Levine would soon be working with and who would go on to become a successful manager in the music industry handling former client Elton John and modern stars like Ed Sheeran.

For a sociable, aspiring lawyer from a broad background it was ideal and Levine was suitably impressed when on his first day, initially working in the banking department, the partners took him out to lunch and bought him champagne. He recalls: ‘The partners were great and I just fitted in. It just worked for me. I had a brilliant time.’

Levine was soon working on the cases newspapers were writing about, including work for The Beatles and The Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie. Levine was part of Elton John’s legal team that won £350,000 damages in 1993 from the Sunday Mirror for claiming the singer had an eating disorder. ‘Frank got a Jag out of that case – I didn’t get a Jag.’

It was shortly after this that Levine was made up to partnership, less than seven years’ post-qualification. On his first visit to the partners’ dining room, Frere’s senior partner John Drewitt reached into an oak drinks cabinet and said: ‘Welcome to the partnership, you may now call me John. Would you like a gin and tonic?’ Levine had joined the club.

However, this ascending career track was soon disrupted by Frere’s internal tensions, with one faction pushing to build out a wider commercial platform and another wanting to focus on real estate and private client. The latter camp broke off to form Forsters in 1998 with the broader practice under Presland moving into Eversheds.

Levine was dismayed. ‘I was the most junior partner. Both sides offered me a job but in honesty, I was sick of it. That was the one time in my career I felt my ideals had been crushed. I’d worked so hard to get to be a partner and it was not what I expected.’

He toyed with following his old roommate, the media and sports specialist David Zeffman, to Olswang but instead turned to another friend to help him with his next move. The friend in question was Conservative MP for Westminster Mark Field, who then ran a headhunters, and set Levine up at Denton Hall, which was about to put together its merger with finance-heavy Wilde Sapte. The firm was looking for a bridge between its IP and media and entertainment groups – a perfect gig for Levine, whose practice had unusually covered IP and technology cases on the one hand and entertainment work on the other. He joined in 1998 and by 2001 was named head of the technology, media and telecoms (TMT) group.

Despite initial success, Levine soon became disenfranchised as Dentons strove to challenge larger City rivals. ‘The firm tried to be a Magic Circle-style practice, which wasn’t realistic, and we were cross-subsidising investments in banking and M&A. My investments would be blocked or worse, they’d say yes and then go back on it, which undermined me.’

Airing his grievances with fellow TMT partners in a wine bar, he discovered he wasn’t alone in looking to leave. ‘We decided we would do much better moving as a team rather than competing against each other for the next few years at different firms.’

Still, it proved difficult to move such a large team. Levine had initially brushed off the interest of DLA, though the firm had enjoyed a meteoric rise from a collection of regional practices in the early 1990s to rapidly become a genuine force in Europe.

Levine was unimpressed, telling his wife that a meeting with Knowles and his astute operational point man Andrew Darwin was ‘going to be the biggest waste of time ever’. He accepted the invitation only to pay back a favour he owed to recruiter Stephen Rodney.

He got the full DLA treatment. While other potential employers dragged their feet, DLA pounced, sketching out a proposal in two days. ‘They pretty much said “yes” immediately and the deal was done very quickly. That ability to just say “yes” defines Nigel,’ says Levine. The team resigned in October 2004.

The deal moved a 45-strong team with 11 partners and annual billings of around £12m, still the largest move between UK law firms in the City. And unusually for high-profile transfers, it proved a long-term success. DLA had only a small IP team, meaning little chance for turf wars, and with DLA later that year agreeing its ground-breaking US union, there was plenty of opportunity to expand the practice.

Levine explains: ‘It wasn’t like you had tissue rejection. This is where you give a lot of credit to Andrew Darwin. He took every single partner out to dinner and made a lot of effort to make sure people were fitting in.’

DLA was at the height of its potency as the UK’s most disruptive challenger brand, a status underlined with a cheeky but witty national newspaper campaign that mocked the City legal elite. Only a few years previously Hammond Suddards and Eversheds looked more likely challengers. No more.

‘In the first few years it was like a one-way rollercoaster,’ recalls Levine. ‘Its success went up and up and up.’

While most teams struggled to build links with the US side of the business after the 2005 merger, Levine formed a good working relationship with his US colleagues, helping to substantially grow the London revenues of its IP and technology (IPT) group (the team currently generates around £20m in London and over £85m firm-wide).

Cameron Jay Rains, now co-chief executive of DLA heading up the Americas side of the firm, comments: ‘We first met Simon because he was one of the heads of the IP practice and he and [US counterpart] John Allcock really got the notion of what it means to have a global practice. They worked together on pitches so we saw a lot of Simon. Over time it became pretty clear that he was a guy who had a vision of the global firm that was congruent with us. If we had an example of integration for all of our other practice group leaders, it would be that. It was absolutely best in class.’

The Amsterdam-based Barbara van Hussen, who Levine has promoted to co-head of Europe and the Middle East, first met Levine at a pitch for sportswear giant Nike. ‘I immediately had a chemistry with him. He builds relationships in the first minute and was an impressive manager of the IPT group,’ she says.

‘Simon was always the guy who was sitting with an iPad, a BlackBerry, an iPhone and a laptop and trying to communicate on all these devices at the same time while trying to be totally engaged in the meeting he was in. He is very funny and you can take the mickey out of him all the time because when you make a joke he always thinks you’re being serious. He has something boyish, which makes him nice.’

Must come down

The upward ride had to end eventually and after the banking crisis gripped the markets in 2008, the drop was sharper for DLA Piper than most. The firm had sizeable property and acquisition finance teams in the UK – areas the hardest hit – and was no more than a solid player in disputes. Moreover, the firm had become used to rapid growth at home and abroad and had built up its cost base with its mergers. It was facing a shock organisationally and to its culture.

There was also a feeling that the once potent double act of Knowles and Darwin had become over-stretched during the firm’s expansion. In particular, the firm’s Middle East launch had been uncharacteristically dogged with problems, ultimately inflicting multimillion-pound losses through 2009.

For the first time, Knowles’ sky-high profile was viewed by some as cause for discontent, with many partners questioning if there was enough attention to detail given its new-found scale. Even Knowles’ honour in being awarded a knighthood in January 2009 almost became a liability, separating him further from the coalface of working partners.

Revenue fell 13% between 2008 and 2010, sinking from $2.26bn to $1.96bn, which dragged profits per equity partner (PEP) down 16% in 2009 to $1.05m.

If the Middle East problems became a lightning rod for criticism of management, Knowles stresses the long-term benefits of DLA’s push in the region. ‘We had an enormous amount of work in the Middle East for which we’d hired people and it all got cancelled in the first month of 2009. We had £25m worth of work pulled in a month. That was a really bad moment and a tough time for me personally. On a three-year cycle you’d have said opening in the Middle East was a bad thing, but on a 20-year cycle it’s a good thing.’

DLA Piper announced deep cuts through 2009, including the loss of 124 jobs in the UK, 80 associates in the US and 54 jobs in Asia. US associates also saw a 10% cut in salaries, while the troubled Middle East practice saw two rounds of job cuts.

While many other major UK firms made substantive cuts during 2009, DLA attracted fire for offering far less generous redundancy pay-outs than some rivals, hardly in keeping with the globe-trotting brand. In addition, many felt the restructuring was poorly handled, undermining the sure touch DLA had become known for.

A spate of grumbling among northern DLA partners regarding Knowles’ involvement in fixed-fee legal provider Riverview Law in 2012 also highlighted the new mood of dissent. When Knowles in late 2011 was handed another term as co-chief executive, it was telling that the re-appointment was no longer seen as a certainty.

The US practice, which had a stronger rebound during 2010 and 2011 than the European and Asian side of the business, had also become impatient with the slowing momentum at its counterpart.

It was against this backdrop that in late 2011 DLA Piper made the surprise move to recruit former Linklaters managing partner Tony Angel as its senior partner of its international business and global co-chair, an unprecedented move in the legal industry in hiring a former law firm ‘chief executive’ into a C-Suite role.

The sales pitch was that Knowles has asked his old friend (the pair had been on good terms for some time) to join the team to help take DLA to the next stage, with Angel brought in to polish the rapidly-assembled firm and improve its rigour. But there was more to it than that – the increasingly influential US side of the business wanted Angel on board as counter-weight to Knowles and to help build bridges across the Atlantic.

While Angel had one of the strongest reputations as a law firm leader from his record at Linklaters, Levine himself wasn’t convinced. Introduced to Angel during the negotiations he challenged him, asking: ‘Before we start and you ask me questions, I’ve got one for you: I’m head of the IPT team – why would I want you anywhere near our senior management when you systematically destroyed that team at Linklaters?’

The attempt to get a rise out of Angel failed as he calmly laid out why that course had been right for Linklaters but not DLA. Levine recalls: ‘I thought: “Wow! That’s really smart, very logical and he didn’t respond in an emotional way.” I would have been piling in at that point.’

Levine would become an admirer of Angel over the following three years as the former Linklaters partner pushed to make the firm more sophisticated. While Knowles had always been reluctant to peel back DLA’s UK offices, despite many partners in London and the US feeling the firm was over-resourced in its domestic market, Angel pushed for and subsequently oversaw a restructuring of its UK business. In 2013, this saw the firm close its ten-partner Glasgow office, divest its defendant insurance business and centralise a 116-staff document production team in Leeds.

Management, under the influence of Angel, set out to strip back under-performing offices and invest in higher quality lawyers in the major European cities. The arrival of Angel also heralded a new emphasis on corporate, with one former partner noting there ‘is less of a focus on disputes’.

Levine comments: ‘Tony has never let me down in the three years and he’s worked closely with me and mentored me to some degree. We as a firm would try to earn a few quid and he would say: “Why are you putting all this work in here to earn a fiver when you can probably make a tenner here?” That was the business school thinking and business rigour he brought to us. I learnt a tonne of stuff off him.’

A good working relationship with Angel and Knowles supported what had already been a very successful run for Levine, whose group was still largely intact. Levine’s success with the IPT group resulted in his promotion in May 2012 to co-head of groups and sectors, a new division he ran with Juan Picón, one of the firm’s top corporate lawyers on the Continent. Many partners were fearful that Knowles had not fully prepared the firm for succession and this overhaul of the firm’s international governance structure, overseen by Angel, was designed to prepare Levine and Picón to potentially succeed Knowles.

It was Levine’s performance here, working on integration, which persuaded Angel to recommend him as Knowles’ successor in a paper to DLA Piper’s executive team in November 2013. Comments Angel: ‘You’ve got to see things from a global perspective and [Levine] not only led his group but became managing director for four of our eight major practice groups on a global basis and has a strong sector focus. That plays to the strengths of the firm and the direction of the firm.’

While some were expecting Darwin to succeed Knowles, there was a wider feeling that the firm needed a new generation and some distance from the Knowles legacy.

With the firm having vowed in 2012 to avoid the infighting that accompanies open elections, Levine secured the recommendation of the executive team and the partnership voted him in in April 2014. Levine’s appointment also spoke to a stronger influence of the US business and its preference for managers who maintained some fee earning.

‘We had a choice and we made that choice without losing anyone on the way,’ says Knowles. ‘It’s been textbook succession planning.’

On 1 January 2015 Levine officially assumed one of the biggest law firm leadership roles, taking over from the highest profile leader in global law.

Taking responsibility

It is clear that Levine will usher in a change in style and priorities from his predecessor. Roger Meltzer, global co-chairman from the US division, observes: ‘You’ll see that over the next three years the aggregate growth will slow as profitability and revenue per lawyer [RPL] improves. The composition of what we’re doing is moving upmarket and we’ll build on that.’

The push upmarket will require work on the firm’s consistency, cross-selling and firm-wide governance. ‘That is a big job,’ concedes Levine. ‘But if I get to the end of my period in office and DLA Piper is a consistent and high-quality global law firm I will die a happy man.’

Levine hopes the end result will be serving far more of DLA Piper’s top clients across more offices. While progress has been made, there is still a lack of trust among US partners as to the quality of some international offices and firm-wide account management across the US and the international divisions of DLA remains under-developed.

Levine also highlights improving the firm’s operational sharpness and communication channels as other priorities. He has reshuffled DLA’s management team to ensure those at the top of the firm understand the needs of its partnership. He comments: ‘I don’t want to have the days of non-fee-earning management. I accept that you’ve got to have a balance between the two but I don’t want people to lose touch with what it’s like to be client-facing.’

‘Nigel is good at communication but there’s no doubt that as you enter into a new generation people want to know that one of their own can be managing partner. All these types of law firms are behemoths. They are large tankers so the partners want to know that there’s someone 24/7 that they can get to do a great pitch document if they’re stuck in the office. Law firms are behind many businesses operationally as that would not be an issue for people at GE or Coca-Cola.’

Picón picks up the theme. ‘Simon is the right man for the time. Being a practitioner he will get closer to the thinking of what the market is demanding and what products will need to be offered, something you would not expect Nigel to know as he was more about the big picture. Simon has an incredible command of his practice and the practice of other groups. We can do a lot of things in terms of putting specifics to big ideas and implementing those.’

The new leader says he will be ‘more hands on’ than Knowles, who he says ‘will want to think of the next big thing’ while Levine tends to ‘not let up until [a strategy] has been implemented’.

While Angel held a huge amount of executive power in the senior partner position, the role is expected to shift under Knowles, with Levine becoming the driving force. Indeed, one partner at the firm comments that Knowles will ‘only be executive in name’.

Levine says the down-to-earth approach and attention to detail he learned from his father will be a major influence. ‘My key phrase to our partners has been: “I want you to behave like businessmen and businesswomen,”’ says Levine. ‘We’ve all got to take a bit of responsibility for this. It’s too much of a cop-out for the partners to say it’s all down to me. It isn’t all down to me. One of things I said on my office visits was that if in three years’ time you point your finger at me and say: “You didn’t achieve it, Simon”, I’m going to point the finger right back at you and say: “I can’t achieve anything, only you guys can achieve something”.’

Levine’s style seems well suited to institutionalise the firm but he may need more time to build political support among the partnership to help execute his strategy. While he has strong support in the US, he remains relatively low profile outside of senior management.

Knowles comments: ‘He needs support, particularly in the early days, and there’s an element of pastoral care and communication within the partnership as you’ve got to spend time explaining to people what we’re trying to do and how we’re going to do it. Hearts and minds are a crucial factor to making a firm like ours successful.’

Angel, on the other hand, believes Levine is fully prepared: ‘He has good emotional intelligence as well as intellectual intelligence. Today you need both. Simon led the biggest lateral hire move in the City and the way it moved and then integrated was very effective. We are a huge firm so the ability to integrate people and make them work together as a team is essential.’

DLA Piper – A six-year view
Year	Revenue	Profits per equity partner	Revenue per lawyer
2008	$2,262m	$1.252m	$590,000
2009	$1,948m	$1.050m	$527,000
2010	$1,961m	$1.137m	$586,000
2011	$2,247m	$1.228m	$600,000
2012	$2,440m	$1.308m	$605,000
2013	$2,481m	$1.324m	$626,000

‘I’d sooner have our challenges’

While DLA Piper’s global rise has been meteoric, Levine and his team inherit a firm facing huge challenges given its dual profit centre structure and sheer scale. Following the cuts of 2009, DLA moved back into rapid expansion mode in 2011 as it opened offices in Berlin, Miami and Delaware, while merging with DLA Phillips Fox to add five Australian offices. It launched in Mexico in 2012 and South Korea in 2013.

Knowles argues that the firm’s post-Lehman response has been characterised by its typically bold approach. ‘The financial crisis cost a lot of firms their vision and they fell back in a way that they will never recover from. We navigated the financial crisis and it did not cost us our vision. If we’d been incomplete in our geographic coverage before the crisis, then when things returned to a more sustainable level, it’s a real big question as to whether we’d have had the resolve to build out the firm. It was either a stroke of luck or unbelievable leadership. It was probably a bit of both.’

Still, many would take a more jaded view of what DLA still needs to achieve. Angel had given focus to improving the firm’s London and Paris offices as well as its wider Asia-Pacific offering, and the firm created a substantial investment pool worth around £15m in 2014 to back target key areas, but the project is far from complete.

To date, Paris has been the biggest beneficiary of the push, with the firm’s merger with French boutique Frieh Bouhenic bolstering the corporate team in 2012 and setting the scene for the hiring of a string of highly-rated practitioners. ‘The office has gone from 60 lawyers and a middling practice to 150 lawyers and is number one in private equity,’ says Angel. Much of this success has been attributed to Michel Frieh, who is now the France managing partner, and the retrenchment of international firms in Europe helped DLA to take a more prominent position in the market.

Spain, driven by Picón, has been another success story. One DLA partner comments on the Spanish arm: ‘A bloody good example of our quality in Europe came when Vodafone unbundled their Verizon JV for $130bn. When they had the money in the bank and went and acquired Ono, Linklaters would have been expecting to get that, but we got it. There’s a re-rating of us in the market. It’s fair to say we wouldn’t have got it five years ago and it shows we can now proceed to get work from large corporates where the Magic Circle have dominated.’

London, however, is generally regarded as still needing work to match the firm’s ambitions, a contrast to New York, which is felt to have made up some ground in recent years. Angel says the London corporate practice was ‘subscale given our operations in continental Europe and the US’ and while the group has grown, DLA’s City deal team still comes up short. Picón says: ‘it has always been difficult for us to attract the heavy hitters in more established markets like London and Germany, sometimes because of the brand and sometimes because of people being less eager to take risks’. (Levine, who concedes the setbacks in the City, counters that London is currently ‘absolutely flying’ and ‘blowing the budget more than any other office’.)

DLA Piper has recruited some high-profile lawyers in the City since the banking crisis, including longstanding Linklaters corporate partner Jon Hayes in 2009. Other significant appointments include corporate partners Rob Salter from Berwin Leighton Paisner and Anu Balasubramanian from Kirkland & Ellis in 2013 and the firm last year boosted its private equity team with Tim Wright from King & Wood Mallesons SJ Berwin.

On a broader level a key challenge for Levine will be galvanising a firm that has lost the momentum it had grown used to before the crash. The firm’s partnership shrank for the first time since its US merger in 2013, down 31 to 1,270.

The firm has seen only modest growth between 2011 and 2013 in both the US and the international business. Firm-wide revenues in 2013 at $2.48bn were only modestly ahead of the $2.26bn the firm recorded in 2008 despite a sizeable merger in the interim.

Asia has been particularly problematic for the firm. The strategy has been to cut before it rebuilt, shrinking its capital markets team in Singapore and Hong Kong and employment and insurance teams in Australia as it seeks a similar practice balance around the world.

The Australian merger in 2011 with DLA Phillips Fox has required particular attention despite bringing in around $150m of revenue. The legacy firm’s heavy insurance focus was so out of kilter with the rest of DLA Piper that Knowles sent Darwin down under with a five-year plan in 2013.

Darwin comments: ‘When we did the financial merger in May 2011 we all knew that although they’d done a bit of restructuring in advance, there’d be more work to be done to make the firm aligned with what we are elsewhere. So far the focus has been on making sure the elements that didn’t fit strategically, found a home where they did fit. We need to grow the corporate practice this year so that we can make the balance right.’

But by consensus DLA Piper is so far yet to hit its stride in Asia, with the oversight of the region switching to the US last year, arguably creating an ambiguous governance structure in the region. The situation has been compounded by the firm’s failure to obtain a qualifying foreign law practice licence in Singapore.

More than 20 partners were shed in the region between 2011 and 2014, though the firm is now back in expansion mode, having reunited three former Jones Day lawyers led by corporate heavyweight John Viverito from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Angel comments: ‘You’re starting to see the other part of that strategy, which is not just paring away bits that were not entirely consistent with the market positioning of the firm but hiring.’

On a broader level, DLA Piper still wrestles with the issue of quality. One current partner comments: ‘Can I honestly, hand on heart, tell a client that they will get the same level of quality as London in South Africa, the Middle East or Asia? No, I can’t.’ While the broader spread of its practice made more sense during a period of rapid growth and in its former pitch as a clear alternative to top New York and City firms, DLA Piper’s current direction needs a different approach.

This requires more consistent quality both within the partnership and individual offices and far more sophisticated cross-selling. All this will require more integration, communication and greater confidence within the firm in referring work out to other offices.

Levine concedes there is room for improvement: ‘There are massively significant mandates from the US. If you’re in New York and your pet client is sitting in front of you, you’ve got to be very confident that the person you’re sending it to in London or Hong Kong is someone you trust to provide a consistent level of quality.’

DLA Piper’s culture and remuneration will also need further work to support and incentivise this institutionalised approach. And though DLA’s meritocratic pay model can allow it to pay above £2m for a small number of stars, an upmarket drive will bring pressure to raise underlying profitability to support the hire and retention of more high-end specialists in disputes and deal work.

The firm’s PEP in 2013 of $1.32m lags the Global 100 average for that year of $1.5m, as does its RPL of $626,000, against an average of $769,000 across the group. That is a notable figure given that DLA was the largest firm by revenue in the world that year.

Levine says that ‘the level of profitability is good and is likely to improve’, adding that there is ‘phenomenally good financial prudence’. ‘You name me another law firm that is cash positive? I can go home at night without worrying I’m going to lose my house and my partners can do the same.’

From now on, Levine says there will be a ‘counterbalance’ whereby some offices will shrink and some will grow, which, combined with a greater focus on operational improvements, supports his view that PEP will rise from its current level. One senior partner expects the firm to reach PEP of over $1.7m by the end of 2017, and says it would be a failure not to do so.

Ultimately, the biggest issue facing Levine comes back to the sheer grind of unifying a sprawling global network on this scale. For all the protestations from verein-backed law firms that such internal structuring is irrelevant to clients – such firms have in general under-performed single-profit centre rivals over the last five years, suggesting the model is harder to manage.

DLA Piper maintains that it can achieve its goals without full financial integration, which would carry a huge one-off tax bill, but operational and governance integration has to improve. The question remains as to whether the firm will move to unify more leadership roles under a single head and further away from its dual-leadership structure.

All in, it is a less glamorous and audacious vision than the startling assembly of DLA Piper that Knowles presided over, though it may ultimately prove the more note-worthy achievement, truly positioning the firm as a world-beater in tune with a new disruptive and globalised era of global law.

Judged on that yardstick, Levine appears to be the right man for the job, blending Knowles’ people skills and down-to-earth humour with Angel’s rigour and US contacts, while having the at-the-coalface credibility of a practising lawyer.

Knowles, of course, argues that the best is still to come: ‘We’re on a journey and we’ll never get to the end of it, because when you think you’ve got there a whole new set of challenges present themselves. But if you want to be a lawyer, there’s not a better place to be than our firm. We’ve got challenges, but I’d sooner have the challenges we’ve got than the challenges most firms have got. We can deal with ours.’ LB

tom.moore@legalease.co.uk, alex.novarese@legalease.co.uk