Observers of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer have grown used to the City giant undercutting bold claims for its US strategy with half-hearted execution but the London leader has belied that image to announce an audacious launch in the key West Coast legal market. The announcement today (1 July), sees the Magic Circle firm recruit five senior …
While it’s surprising in some regards that it took this long, Allen & Overy has done the UK legal market a favour by substantially re-setting compensation bands for its junior lawyers. The move, confirmed on Monday (22 June), will see starting salaries and bonuses for newly-qualified lawyers in London fall from the current benchmark of …
For journalists, ill winds usually bring a few benefits, not least that readers have greater interest in what we’re churning out. But while it’s a good time for industry anoraks to get the attention they crave, it’s not the pieces I’ve done in 2020 on crisis, coronavirus or even Black Lives Matter that have attracted …
If there is one topic on which the legal profession manages to be both verbose and yet perennially avoid substantive debate it is race. That is unsurprising given the woeful progress that large commercial law firms have made in recruiting black lawyers and staff in any numbers over the last 20 years. There is progress …
It’s fair to say that Legal Business has long been sceptical of the prospects for listed UK law firms, and none more so than the most hyped of the lot, DWF. ‘The 2020s still look likely to end with public markets as a marginal force in global law,’ noted our recent cover feature on the …
Sometimes a shock looks certain to leave life forever changed only for things to carry on much as normal. Sometimes, the jolt marks a genuine crack in the foundations underpinning industries, business and society. We now know that for the profession and the City, the banking crisis proved very much in the latter camp. In …
Try driving across London or walking its crowded parks in sunny May and it becomes hard to remember that the nation, and much of the Western world, exists in a state of at least semi-lockdown. While food queues and the inability to do much beyond kick around the house testifies that things are far from …
Casting my mind back to the ancient history of mid-March when I penned my first piece assessing the impact that the coronavirus crisis would have on the profession, I was forced to rely on guess work and recent history as a guide. London was in semi-lockdown, the official death toll from the virus hovered around 10,000 …
Towards the end of 2019, Legal Business remarked that the issue at the heart of Allen & Overy (A&O)’s looming leadership election was if the process would resolve whether the winners could achieve the right to genuinely lead the City giant. Now that the election has concluded, with the re-election of Wim Dejonghe (pictured) as …
Skadden Arps, Clifford Chance, Linklaters and, currently, Kirkland & Ellis – over the last 30 years these firms have all at one time had claims to have been the most influential law firms of their age, the pioneers that defined the top of the profession through dash, ambition and imagination. And many senior lawyers would …
