The I in Team – what it takes to turn a lateral into a star player

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Hiring star partners remains the main tactic for firms hoping to move up a division. Legal Business talks to four of the select few who have moved and excelled to find what it takes to drive a new team.

It was just a few disorientating days into his new job at Ashurst Morris Crisp and up-and-coming banking partner Mark Vickers was facing a minor but embarrassing dilemma: with a tight deadline, he had no idea how to order a taxi.

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Positional play

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Legal Business looks at five US firms that have recently made strategic moves in the City

With the collapse of Dewey & LeBoeuf, for many US law firms in London 2012 was about opportunism and securing what few advances a turbulent market offered. Nonetheless, a growing band of US-bred advisers are making their mark in the Square Mile. While overall numbers tend to obscure the progress of US practices in London as a whole, recent years have seen a growing band of firms make significant tactical inroads in areas as diverse as funds, litigation and debt securities.

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Revolution on a shoe string

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Quinn Emanuel’s no-frills, high-end approach to law has re-written the rules on what US advisers can achieve in London after a startling run of growth. Legal Business asks how the iconoclastic disputes shop does it.

It’s the day after Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan has moved into its new London office at Fleet Place and boxes bursting with paperwork still occupy the small reception hall. There is no fancy artwork on these walls, nor much in the way of hi-tech gadgets; everything is basic, minimal, functional. On entering the interview room, tap water is offered and greetings take place with London co-managing partner Richard East and former Allen & Overy (A&O) arbitration partner Stephen Jagusch – last year’s star UK signing – the latter dressed in jeans.

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Global London top 50

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The firms that appear in Global London are the 50 largest non-UK originated firms in London, ranked by headcount.

Partner and lawyer numbers were all requested as full-time equivalent averages for 2012. All partner hires were up to and including February 2013. Total lawyer numbers include partners, associates, assistants and trainees but not paralegals. An average exchange rate for the year 2012 was used for Global London. This was £1=$1.58474. Full table follows…

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End games

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The 11th annual Legal Business Global London survey shows that US firms in the City are playing to win. UK rivals should watch every move.

Lock up your associates. Chain down your partners. The Americans still want to take your lawyers (and lunch). This year’s Global London survey emphatically confirms that leading US law firms are firmly back in growth mode in the City. Fifteen firms have seen headcount rise by more than 10% compared to 2011, while overall headcount across the 50 firms is up 2.6% on last year to 4,382.

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Generation game

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International wealth preservation and succession planning is now a core component of most successful private client practices. Legal Business assesses how far firms will go to keep it in the family

If innovation is a measure of how competitive London’s private client market has become, then the contest for top spot has only intensified over the past year. With London seen as a safe haven for many of the world’s high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), the question for the capital’s leading private client practices is how to develop an edge over the competition. Strategies include international expansion, rare lateral hires, and offering entirely new service lines – all illustrating that private client lawyers have needed to adapt to a swiftly evolving and increasingly global market.

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Setting the heather on fire

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Our Management Partner of the Year, Bill Drummond, begins his fifteenth year running Brodies in May. We track his firm’s success amid a turbulent Scots market and ask if Brodies’ rise signals the decline of the country’s traditional elite

Bill Drummond wore his trade mark kilt as he stepped up to be named Management Partner of the Year at the Legal Business Awards in February. The attire was fitting, not because Brodies’ longstanding head is a staunch nationalist, but rather because Drummond has led his firm to startling success on the back of an unashamed focus on his home field.

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Ready for his close up

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Outspoken, opinionated and often right, K&L Gates head Peter Kalis has made financial transparency his latest mission. Legal Business talks to the Rhodes Scholar who runs a $1bn firm yet still can’t fit into the US legal establishment

‘I was embarrassed to be in the same profession as Dewey & LeBoeuf,’ states Peter Kalis, not without a sense of the dramatic. The chairman and global managing partner of K&L Gates is referring to the circumstances in which the aforementioned Wall Street giant last year became the largest-ever legal collapse amid acrimony and controversies over financial reporting.

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Europe in Union

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The ravages of the global recession and the European sovereign debt crisis have threatened to turn the long boom law firms have enjoyed into a painful bust. But Europe’s resilient full-service firms are weathering the storm, and many are finding that economic turmoil is bringing opportunities as well as challenges.

In law’s long boom years, it seemed to many that the bumper revenues and profits from an ever-rising tide of transactions would last forever; there was always another wave of deals to be done. But since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and the global financial crisis, law firms that once thrived on a seemingly insatiable demand for everything M&A have faced the painful realisation that this lucrative era is over.

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Risk management and professional indemnity survey 2013: Counting the Cost

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While the end of the assigned risks pool may encourage more insurers into the market, professional indemnity insurance for law firms is as competitively priced as ever.

As law firms experience constant pressure to rein in costs, the pricing of professional indemnity insurance (PII) is high on the agenda. As PII is typically law firms’ third-largest expense, after staff and premises, that 76% of respondents said that they found PII generally to be reasonably priced (a marginal increase on 71% last year) is good news for firms generally. But despite widespread reports of an increasingly soft market, the number of respondents saying their insurance is over-inflated has increased from 7% to 17%.

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