RPC in talks with breakaway Edwards Wildman partners alongside Cooley and Foley & Lardner

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RPC is in talks with a potential breakaway group of Edwards Wildman Palmer City partners – made up of corporate partners Niall McAlister, Eero Rautalahti, Stuart Blythe, and insurance and reinsurance partner David Kendall – alongside California-headquartered Cooley and top-60 Global 100 US firm Foley & Lardner.

The formerly five-strong splinter group is down to four after Shawn Atkinson, who served as co-chair of Edwards Wildman’s venture capital group, resigned in June to go to Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.

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Silver linings playbook: can Norton Rose Fulbright bring its disputes team into the global elite?

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Sarah Downey assesses the post-merger state of NRF’s dispute resolution practice

With Norton Rose Fulbright (NRF)’s eye-catching union now over a year old, the top ten UK firm has achieved the enviable feat of creating, through a succession of global bolt-ons, a 3,800-lawyer firm with $1.9bn in revenue, almost without fallout.

Its 138-fee-earner (excluding trainees) City dispute resolution practice is something of an exception, having lost a handful of its star players, including Dorian Drew, adviser to ex-Barclays’ chief executive Bob Diamond on the Libor scandal, who last year left for Clifford Chance.

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Bird & Bird secures dual Indonesia tie-up in continued Asia push

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Bird & Bird has signed strategic co-operation agreements with two Indonesian law firms, intellectual property specialists K&K Advocates and business law firm Nurjadin Sumono Mulyadi & Partners (NSMP).

The agreements, which were signed on 24 June in Jakarta, come as the top-20 firm, which already has a presence in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore, experiences a period of rapid growth in the Asia-Pacific region stemming back 18 months.

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Taylor Wessing launches US rep offices in Palo Alto and New York

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Taylor Wessing on 23 June announced the opening of two representative offices in the US to facilitate access to its European network. Located in tech-focused Palo Alto and New York, both offices are set to open in September this year.

The top 20 firm will not be practising US law, but instead plans to use its new US bases to push out work to its international network across Europe, CEE and Asia.

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City firms support diversity targets by committing to female partnership ratio

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With private practice diversity statistics still often trailing their clients, last month saw rhetoric translated into targets at Ashurst and Linklaters, as they became the latest City law firms to commit to a female partnership ratio.

Linklaters is the third Magic Circle firm, after Allen & Overy (A&O) and Clifford Chance, to set itself targets, declaring that 30% of all partner promotions will be women by 2018, while its female management roles will double within the same time frame.

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Q&A with Blake Morgan’s Walter Cha

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The merger between Blake Lapthorn and Morgan Cole went live on 1 July to create Blake Morgan. The firm’s managing partner, Walter Cha, talks competition and strategy.

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How did the merger come about and what are the reasons behind it?

We both acted for common clients and a lot of people were known to each other. We have a partnership at Blake Lapthorn and Morgan Cole that are ambitious and want to see themselves grow rather than wait for other things to impact on them.

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Ceasefire or guerrilla skirmishes – Ashurst struggles to reconcile its post-merger factions

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Jaishree Kalia reports on the uneasy peace still hanging over the post-merger Ashurst

It’s been over eight months since Charlie Geffen, the high-profile head of Ashurst, suffered a bruising leadership defeat to litigator Ben Tidswell (pictured) in the wake of the City firm’s merger vote with its Australian partner.

There was no doubt the election defeat of the strong-willed Geffen, who divided the City firm’s partnership into staunch supporters and embittered opponents, and the legacy of its merger with Australian leader Blake Dawson had unsettled the firm. The discharge of Geffen as the ‘war-time’ leader who carried the firm’s strategy and brand through the post-Lehman years is still hard to take for some, while the merger has not convinced everyone. The somewhat ill-tempered resignation in November of highly rated corporate co-head Stephen Lloyd for Allen & Overy (A&O) was an all-too visible sign of that tension – and the lack of engagement felt by the ‘boys’ club’ in Ashurst’s corporate finance teams.

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Hostile takeovers globally at highest value since May 2007

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Increase in bids raises hopes of a rise in UK M&A work

M&A partners are predicting that the UK could soon see an increase in lucrative hostile takeovers after the first five months of this year saw unsolicited bids globally hit their highest value since May 2007, standing at a total of $273.4bn.

Bids, whether pending, completed, withdrawn or rejected, are up significantly on the $70.6bn announced in 2013, according to figures from Dealogic, largely driven by Pfizer’s unsuccessful $122.6bn approach for the UK’s AstraZeneca, announced on 2 May, in what is the third largest hostile M&A bid on record.

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Marking your own homework: Dentons and a defence of PEP

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Alex Novarese takes a jaded view of the latest attempt to avoid transparency

It would almost be too easy to pick holes in the letter that Dentons has supplied to the media to justify its attempt to withhold its profits on the basis of Olympian high principle. But I won’t let that stop me.

The letter, authored by Dentons’ chief executive Elliott Portnoy and chair Joe Andrew, sets out a number of arguments as to why Dentons won’t disclose basic information on the profitability and the margins on which it operates. Without exception, they lack substance, though to varying degrees. Indeed, it’s notable that Dentons largely fails to make any of the credible arguments for not supplying figures on profit per equity partner (PEP).

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Life during law: Charles Martin

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In the end Macfarlanes’ response to the recession was very strong. We learned not to be frightened of change and our powers embraced this in a way which was very invigorating… I wish we’d responded a little sooner. But we got there and I’m proud of what we achieved.

The firm got its mojo back. That wasn’t a given. We were phenomenally successful – we were a deal machine and managed to adapt in a way that the mix of the practice today is quite different to six years ago.

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