US firm Locke Lord has continued its rapid expansion in London since launching in February this year with the addition of three more lateral hires within a few weeks.
The arrival of Mayer Brown reinsurance litigator Ian McKenna at the end of October was followed by the hire of Fox Williams’ corporate finance partner James Channo and Mishcon de Reya’s former head of finance, Luke Morris, in November.
These additions means that the Texas-based firm now has 17 partners in London, in an office that opened in February following the hire of seven partners from Salans, including former Salans global chair Stephen Finch.
‘London is obviously a very important legal market for our clients so we felt like we were missing out on opportunities not having an office there,’ said Locke Lord chair Jerry Clements. ‘We watched the demand carefully over a number of years before we made the decision.’
While the firm’s latest incarnation in London is a start-up, it did have a satellite office in the Lloyds building in London for a few years and was once reported to be in merger discussions with Barlow Lyde & Gilbert. Clements said the firm realised last year that it needed a stronger foothold in the City in the shape of a permanent fully staffed base. She added that the recent spurt of lateral hires is uncharacteristic – Locke Lord has traditionally taken a much more conservative approach to international expansion.
‘We felt like we were missing out on opportunities not having an office in London.’
Jerry Clements, Locke Lord
Finch, who was at Salans for 22 years, heads Locke Lord’s London office and is responsible for current recruitment strategy. In addition to the three recent hires and the original seven-partner Salans team, Finch has hired Jonathan Denton, who was in-house counsel at Berkeley House Investments (and before that Salans); Joseph Kosky from Ashfords; Damian Cleary and Gavin Coull from Steptoe & Johnson; Sarah Linton from Dewey & LeBoeuf; and Rob Askew, again from Salans. Ayesha Hasan, a finance associate at Berwin Leighton Paisner joined as a partner in September.
Finch said that he left Salans because ‘the firm was going in a direction I wasn’t really feeling was right. A few of us were disillusioned, and we liked the Locke Lord strategy, financial position, and they were supportive with our idea of developing London’.
Locke Lord, which was formed following the merger of Texas firm Locke Liddell & Sapp and Chicago’s Lord Bissell & Brook in 2007, is ranked at 86 in our current Global 100 table, with revenues up 5% this year to $416.1m, and PEP standing at $1m. However, both Finch and Clements denied that it was remuneration that lured partners from rival firms, with McKenna and Askew confirming that they did not join for the money. McKenna said he was drawn to the firm as its culture is genuinely meritocratic, with none of the centralised management headaches that can often plague the London offices of US firms.
This willingness to treat the London office as more than a mere satellite office was reflected by the decision to elect two London partners to its board of directors – Finch and one of the other partners that joined from Salans in February, Paula Howard.
‘One of the things I often heard in the UK from US firms is that many of them never sat down together and there wasn’t a sense of integration,’ said Clements. ‘So we decided to amend our partnership agreement as I felt it was really critical to have those representatives from our UK office involved.’
‘We wanted to learn from the mistakes that other US firms coming over here have made and have a basic philosophy that if you provide great legal service to your clients, good things follow,’ she added.