Kiss the ring – patronage, in-fighting and exits threaten to stall Kirkland’s bandwagon
Jaishree Kalia sizes up the clashing egos and driving ambition at Kirkland’s City arm.
Flashy cars, Dom Pérignon and top dollar are just some of the things associated with Kirkland & Ellis’ City high-flyers. The top ten global law firm has been highly successful in London since setting up shop in 1994 to service trophy client Bain Capital. The practice is certainly substantial, generating over $180m in 2015, according to one partner.
Global London: The Barbarians storming the gate of City deal work
Mainstream M&A has for decades been the stronghold of the City elite… and the ground US law firms struggled to seize. As some of Wall Street’s elite ramp up City investment, is plc deal work about to fall to US invaders?
With seven days left on the clock to force through a bid for the UK’s largest pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, many in the City were surprised when Pfizer put forward a final £69bn offer on a spring Sunday evening when most shareholders were out enjoying their weekends.
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Global London: European firms move into the unknown
Last year European partners voiced their fears over the possibility of the UK leaving the EU. Now they could be preparing for grim reality.
The issue on every European partner’s lips in London is the outcome and fallout of the UK’s Brexit referendum on 23 June. In last year’s Global London report, there was a palpable hope that Britain wouldn’t vote to leave the EU. Now European firms have to prepare themselves for that possibility.
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Taxation without representation – would you pay for the Law Society to represent you?
From court fee hikes to a mooted City law tax to legal aid cuts, the profession’s relationship with government is at a low ebb. With the Law Society’s fundraising powers under threat, is it time for a new trade union?
It was the most contentious attack on City lawyers in recent memory. A proposal by incoming justice secretary Michael Gove to tax top law firms to fund the criminal courts acted as a rallying cry to the usually placid commercial profession. But it wasn’t the Law Society, which receives £35m a year to represent the profession in England and Wales, leading the fight. Opposition was mounted by the firms themselves and a tiny body operating on nearly a hundredth of the Law Society’s budget.
Golden goodbyes – changing faces and fortunes at the City’s top banking teams
As the golden generation of banking rainmakers retire, Legal Business takes a look at the core teams of the City elite and assesses the talent in the Square Mile’s top finance practices.
‘The days of lawyers being experts only in the investment grade market are a thing of the past,’ reflects Clifford Chance (CC)’s Michael Bates, and, if anyone should know, the Magic Circle firm’s veteran head of finance should. ‘Corporate treasurers are diversifying funding sources, so while you have to be steeped in investment grade knowledge you also need to have a good level of understanding in areas such as the US private placement market, European private placement and institutional lending markets, the investment grade bond world and M&A/stock market-related requirements to ensure different strands of the capital structure work in harmony.’
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The battle within: Risk management and professional indemnity survey 2016
With cyber risk exploding and storm clouds over the economy, it’s harder than ever to balance risk with commercial realities. Legal Business’ annual risk survey asks how law firms are coping.
While no major law firm has yet fallen prey to the sort of high-profile data breach that the mobile operator Talk Talk suffered in 2015, the threat is front and centre of every risk manager’s mind. For those polled in Legal Business’ ninth annual risk management survey with broker Marsh, ‘IT security breach/data management accident or breach’ was again regarded as the most significant risk to law firms in terms of the damage it could cause and the likelihood of it occurring (see table).
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The bigger short – third party funding bets on new markets and models
Historically confined to David vs Goliath claims, a new band of dispute funders are pushing the model into new frontiers. How far can they go?
Hedge fund methodology – the process of using hard numbers to make statistical predictions – is not part of a dispute lawyer’s traditional armoury. Yet the same kind of financial calculation used by banks and asset managers is not just creeping into the disputes market, but threatening to have a significant impact on it.
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The pitch – A new kind of global law firm emerges but can Dentons live up to the hype?
A dismissed also-ran, Dentons has improbably reinvented itself as a pioneer taking legal globalisation to new heights. Critics snipe but can the firm live up to the soaring rhetoric?
‘We’ve obviously grown faster than any law firm ever,’ says Dentons’ iconoclastic chair Joe Andrew as he loads up a presentation designed for potential global suitors. Sitting alongside chief executive and friend Elliott Portnoy they make a slick pair, unsurprising given that this presentation has been practised on more than 100 law firm leaders around the world. The batting average was impressive in 2015. In a breakthrough year, six law firms across the US, China, Australia, Singapore, Colombia and Mexico agreed to join Dentons in a spree without precedent in the legal industry. A law firm written off as a global player in most quarters had become on some measures the world’s largest firm. Actually, it achieved that distinction less than a month into 2015 with the headline-grabbing tie-up with 4,000-lawyer Chinese giant Dacheng. Many in the profession are quick to predict a dramatic fall for this empire but everyone is talking about a firm that two years ago didn’t get a second thought.
Myths and Millennials – the facts, fiction and hard realities of leading junior lawyers
Law firms are increasingly obsessed with the challenge of engaging their Millennial associates. Legal Business separates buzzword from BS
Just what is it that you want to do?
We wanna be free.
We wanna be free to do what we wanna do.
LOADED, PRIMAL SCREAM
It was a very different legal market in 2007 when Simon Harper and a group of colleagues at Berwin Leighton Paisner geared up for the launch of Lawyers On Demand (LOD). Amid boom time for legal services, few knew what to make of a flexi-lawyering business. Working on initial marketing, the idea was hit upon to draw on the famous freedom refrain from Primal Scream’s 1990 song Loaded (actually a sample from the cult film The Wild Angels). The intent was to reach a new generation of lawyers: a generation that in law and in other industries would increasingly be known as Millennials. The impact was immediate, recalls Harper. ‘What made LOD fly was the changing attitudes to work. Some of the CVs we got were amazing.’