Eric Knai, Eversheds Sutherland: If you look back at 2023, we have had a very depressed M&A market other than in the energy sector. If you think about the two geopolitical events that have dominated 2023, the Ukraine war and the conflict in the Middle East towards the end of the year, those are both …
Continue reading “The energy and renewables debate: Power shifts”
In what will be viewed by rivals as a further shot across the bows, Freshfields has continued to make determined inroads with its US strategy, this time hiring private equity M&A partners Neal Reenan and Ian Bushner in New York from Latham & Watkins. The investment is another coup for a firm that has become …
Despite recent laments from London corporate pundits over a depressed deals market, the view of many is that the Irish market is bucking global trends. Stephen Keogh, William Fry’s head of corporate, says: ‘From a transactional point of view, the big feature this year so far has been a smaller amount of multi-billion deals and …
Continue reading “Euro Elite 2024: Ireland – Under pressure”
Awards season. It should be viewed as a time of joy and anticipation, when law firms clamour to showcase their finest achievements of the last year, whether that’s an especially standout deal or matter, or an extraordinary individual moving the dial for the profession. Amusingly, one of my colleagues forwarded this message onto me in …
Continue reading “No shoo-ins at the Legal Business Awards, and beware the perils of TL;DR”
Whether it is the prospect of another few weeks still left of winter, many law firm leaders seem to have started the year under an uncharacteristic cloud of despondency. Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to work out the other reasons why even the peppiest of senior partners might appear noticeably dispirited. The US …
Continue reading “Reasons to be cheerful: the hustle is back for 2024”
Nathalie Tidman, Legal Business: How have your businesses been performing over the last year? What have been the highlights? Deborah Finkler, Slaughter and May: Remarkably well. I certainly think that we have all been holding our breath for the last two years for the downturn, which still has not entirely happened. The biggest issue we …
Continue reading “The Global 100 debate: Going hard and betting long”
David Halliwell, Pinsent Masons Vario: The world is now seen through a ‘VUCA’ lens – it’s Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. Are the risks that businesses are facing much more uncertain? What does that mean for how you are working in your roles? John Ventress, Lombard Odier Investment Managers: As in-house lawyers, we need to …
Continue reading “The in-house debate: Look to the future now”
When I was 12, I was a competitive swimmer, and I used to swim every morning before school. If you’re swimming that much, your swimsuits get see-through, so for training, sometimes you’d have to wear double swimsuits, and that’s a bit of a drag when you’re in a competition. I’d asked my mum for a …
It has long been a peccadillo of business publishers to measure financial performance in five-year increments and for this, our final issue of the year, it seems churlish to break with tradition now. Revisiting our Global 100 coverage from 2018 calls to mind a time capsule, with some of the contents uncannily familiar and others …
‘It is very difficult to see how AI competes with what David Higgins does.’ Looking back five years to our 2018 Global 100 debate, this remark from Milbank’s Suhrud Mehta, one of many eminent City leaders around the table, is striking in more ways than one. The industry has come to think of the now …
Continue reading “Doing the robot – Five years on, the same old AI debate rages on”
