In the wake of the eye-catching tie-up of CMS Cameron McKenna, Nabarro and Olswang, Legal Business noted last year that the gnomic messages around the union made it a hard one to judge. And even after a detailed assessment of the largest UK legal merger ever, as we undertake for this month’s cover feature, it’s not easy to put the pieces together.
In part that is because CMS Cameron McKenna as the firm driving the effective takeover has become a difficult player to judge or benchmark against peers. While the CMS network has grown robustly in recent years, Camerons itself has often shed revenues since the banking crisis. The insistence on positioning the CMS network as a fully-fledged entity to the point of providing financial benchmarks on a group-wide basis only further muddies the water. Personally I would say it has been counter-productive in branding terms as neither fish nor fowl but I will not labour the matter here.
