Life During Law: Ciaran Carvalho, Nabarro

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I decided I wanted to be a lawyer aged 14. My parents’ friends were looking after me while my parents were away. They didn’t have children and wondered what to do with me – we started playing around with words during a game of Scrabble and after that it turned into a career talk because I was slightly argumentative. It struck a chord.

Titmuss Sainer & Webb was a real estate firm before forming an alliance with Dechert Price & Rhoads. The London property guys were worried because they wondered what a US firm would think of real estate. For me, it was an enormous benefit. It opened my eyes to international clients, the wider world, and not just domestic practice.

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Respected Paris boutique launches London arm to target deal work

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French firm AyacheSalama has launched its first international office in the City with four partners as it looks to advise on client investment from London into France more efficiently.

The new City desk will practice French law only and aims to strengthen relationships with investment funds and banks, private equity funds and French companies that invest out of the City. It will also look to build out a client base that already includes Intermediate Capital Group, TowerBrook Capital Partners and MezzVest, with a focus on corporate M&A, private equity, finance and restructuring.

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Linklaters reshuffles to boost corporate and disputes

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Magic Circle firm Linklaters has moved its TMT and tax groups from its commercial division into corporate. The firm has overhauled a three-strand structure – corporate, commercial and finance and projects – in a bid to strengthen its corporate team as the firm looks to crack America.

Around 40 lawyers globally from tax and TMT will come under the corporate umbrella, with the commercial group having been rebranded as dispute resolution.

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Cyber risk moving up the in-house agenda

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General counsel (GC) are increasingly involved in handling cyber security issues at board level, reflecting a more comprehensive shift towards effective risk management, research from Legal Business and PwC has revealed.

In a survey of corporate attitudes to cyber security risk this autumn, which garnered more than 800 responses from a broad mix of senior corporate managers, owners, legal and IT, nearly half (46%) of all GC respondents said they had delivered advice to the board on cyber and data security matters in the last year. Thirty five percent of GC respondents said this occurs on a quarterly basis.

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Fried Frank faces multi-million professional negligence claim

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Collyer Bristow pays £24m settlement over Rangers advice

US firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson is facing a professional negligence claim at London’s High Court. Made by a former client, it alleges multiple breaches of duty over advice provided on the enforcement of a commercial loan in France.

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‘There is a fundamental tension here’: Lawyers nervous about exceptions to professional privilege

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With government intelligence agencies and tax authorities coming under a spotlight in recent weeks over the sourcing of legally privileged documentation, justification and potential implications for such action has increasingly generated cause for concern among City lawyers.

It emerged in November that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal had discovered that legally privileged documents may have been targeted by British intelligence agencies MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.

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A&O and Linklaters scale back in Russia as foreign firms feel the brunt of sanctions

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Law firms scramble to reposition Moscow practice as EU sanctions hit home Russia’s volatile political environment began to have an impact on international and domestic law firms in Moscow at the beginning of this year, but as 2015 nears, and with multiple rounds of international sanctions imposed on the country, the situation has dramatically deteriorated.

US and EU sanctions on Russia have taken their toll on many located in Moscow, including Allen & Overy (A&O), which offered redundancy packages at associate level in October; Linklaters, which seconded 19 associates into other regions; White & Case, which reduced its Moscow-based headcount across both partner and associate levels; and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, whose office associate headcount dropped.

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Guerrillas in our midst: LCIA takes action on award delays and obstructionist tactics

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Tom Moore assesses the impact of the new London arbitration rulebook

The battle lines between arbitration lawyers and litigators have long been drawn along arguments of efficiency and cost. The urban myth, somewhat manufactured by arbitration practitioners themselves, that arbitration is more expedient and less costly than its cousin in the courts has long been dismissed, while increasingly the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA) is not only competing with courts for big-ticket cases, but other institutions around the world.

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