So, after a six-month hiatus we have returned and much has changed. Writing this as we enter a second national lockdown in the UK seems surreal but we hope that this issue finds you in a robust mood, ready to do business for your clients and able to challenge the hysteria peddled by the mainstream media as much as possible.
As Covid-19 took hold, every business changed irreversibly and Legal Business was no exception. Over the Spring and Summer months, a number of highly respected and much-loved colleagues moved on, including editor-in-chief since 2013 Alex Novarese, who has embarked upon the next stage of his career. I would like to personally thank Alex not only for his outstanding achievements with this title over the past seven plus years but also for being an amazing mentor and friend.
However, we are back, ready to face the challenges ahead with the excellent support of all our colleagues across The Legal 500, the GC Powerlist series and throughout Legalease. As our LB100 report shows, with gross revenues climbing nicely, many firms throughout the UK are showing remarkable resilience amid a global pandemic and are taking a sensible approach to profit distributions and staffing while avoiding knee-jerk reactions in what promises to be an even tougher 2020/21. As Travers Smith’s senior partner Kathleen Russ says: ‘We are determined to see this as a long-term issue and are not taking short-term measures or cutting costs.’
And that theme of doing the right thing is pervasive – especially in these most testing of times. Typically we have a reception every year to mark the launch of the GC Powerlist UK at the Legal Business Awards in March but of course this could not happen. Instead, we hosted four webinars with headline sponsor Pinsent Masons throughout October that featured leading in-house advisers from this year’s report, The Change Agenda.
What emerged from those discussions is just how focused general counsel are even now on doing the right thing – at a time when you might expect attention to be purely on keeping the lights switched on for many businesses. GCs and company secretaries are reminding their boards of the importance of sustainability, good corporate governance, and ethics in everything they do and making sure that they walk the walk on these issues, while setting the highest standards themselves as an example to their businesses and their external advisers. Reaction from German GCs to Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer’s involvement in the cum-ex tax scandal in our report is further evidence of this.
Whatever happens over the next 12 months, business is never returning to the way it used to be done. Change is top of the agenda and the profession has the opportunity to reset for the greater good of all concerned.