Skadden London head Richard Youle on a year in management and scaling up London Skadden-style.
‘We’ve had a massive amount of change in the last year,’ says Skadden London head Richard Youle as he sits down to discuss his first year at the helm of the City base.
Youle, who took over as Skadden’s London head from Pranav Trivedi in July 2023 while also maintaining his global co-head of private equity post alongside Ken Wolff in New York, says much of the change has been around how the office and practices are organised.
‘We’ve seen some people step-up into new heads of practice-areas and we looked at the size and shape of our teams and promoted and recruited, where appropriate, to ensure we continue to be a great place to work and can continue to attack the market as powerful challengers,’ he explains.
Practice changes have included Legal 500 leading individuals Katja Butler and George Knighton becoming co-heads of Skadden’s UK corporate practice, while Kate Davies KC has taken over as head of the firm’s international litigation and arbitration group.
The firm has also added a number of lateral partners, including two former Linklaters partners: capital markets partner Noel Hughes, who joined in December, and financial regulatory partner Sebastian Barling, who joined in March this year. Meanwhile the banking practice welcomed Sebastian FitzGerald from Willkie Farr & Gallagher in January.
‘We’re not Real Madrid signing the best player in the world every year, that’s not what we do,’ says Youle, explaining that growth across the firm’s practices is always strategic.
The firm may not recruit as many laterals as rivals such as Kirkland & Ellis, Latham or Paul Weiss but it has increased lawyer count by 62% since 2019, making it the tenth largest firm in LB’s Global London 2024 table by headcount with 227 fee earners. The tally means that within the top 10, Skadden has seen the second biggest increase in lawyer count over the five year period, behind Kirkland.
Youle says he’s applying some of the experience he’s gained on deals to build the office further. He jokes: ‘I never knew coming in that you could scale an office in the same way as you can scale a deal, which I’ve done for donkey’s years, so it was a nice surprise.’
He is keen to stress that lateral recruitment is less important to the firm than internal promotions, which most recently saw Jisun Choi appointed as a tax partner and Nicholas Adams promoted to partner in the UK disputes team, which has seen David Edwards leave to join Simpson Thacher and white collar partner Elizabeth Robertson leave to launch new investigations firm Robertson Pugh Associates.
‘Homegrown talent is most important,’ he says. ‘While I anticipate growth for our office – it will be a considered and strategic mix of lateral hires that fit with our culture and promoting through the ranks.’
Discussing his strategy for the past year, Youle says each practice in the office has been looking at how they can ‘win’.
He adds: ‘I run deals for a living and my leadership style is to break things down into very small pieces.
‘What we’ve done as an office is we’ve really broken things down, both with professional services and practices – working out where we need to position ourselves for the next 10 years of growth.’
When asked how he’d define winning, Youle responds: ‘Winning for me is continuing to ensure we have a laser-focus on client development and client relationships – right from our professional staff, through to our trainees and our partners.’
‘We are nothing, if not for our clients and our people – so I want to ensure we are continuing to provide our clients with that differentiated service, and also providing our people with an engaging environment within which to work and develop.’
In the past year, Skadden has secured a number of notable mandates, including advising BlackRock on its $3.2bn acquisition of UK investment data group Preqin and advising International Paper on its $7.2bn acquisition of FTSE 100 packaging company DS Smith, alongside Slaughter and May and Sidley.
Looking back on the firm’s successes, Youle maintains that the team’s biggest achievement is ‘how we’ve challenged ourselves on culture around the office.’
He says that the firm introduced Skadden Spirit, a campaign focused on promoting its core values through cultural ambassadors, with over 30 ambassadors within the firm already participating.
‘Ambassadors help decide how we are going to focus on a particular core value every few months – whether that be motivational speakers or events or even making small tweaks to our existing offerings including our affinity groups and well-being initiatives,’ concluded Youle.