Asked whether the Irish legal market is awash with contentious work, one leading litigator sighs deeply and quips: ‘Well, the country is certainly full of contention.’ Every dip in any economic cycle brings a raft of litigious work, but the spectacular collapse of Ireland’s banking and property sectors following the global credit crisis has brought …
Over the past few months CMS Cameron McKenna’s managing partner Duncan Weston has been on a charm offensive. Through lunches and presentations, he has been trying to convince the legal press that the European-wide CMS network is not just a disparate alliance, but is in fact one firm, no different to, say, Norton Rose or …
From merger mania to profit manipulation – the LB100 in 2012 draws on familiar themes from 20 years of law firm financials. If there’s one thing the last 20 years have taught us at LB, it’s that the legal profession carries on regardless. The UK may have entered into a double-dip recession despite quantitative easing; …
In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected US president; the Maastricht Treaty was signed and Legal Business published the financial data of 35 firms with revenues over £20m. Over the last 20 years, as the information age has developed, total revenues of the 100 largest law firms based in the UK have swelled from £2.7bn to …
Continue reading “Twenty years on and the numbers still add up”
Shanghai’s location at the estuary of the Yangtze River attracts rainfall for a third of the year. Lawyers from the region will feel at home in Ireland then, a country not renowned for its weather. Earlier this year, law firm A&L Goodbody officially launched its pioneering Chinese Lawyer Exchange Programme, signing agreements with 15 Chinese …
When we first published the gross fees of 35 leading firms with revenues over £20m in 1992, we were approaching the peak of the information age: the exponential rise of e-mail, the web and the mobile phone. Suddenly the way we went about our daily lives changed forever and we have rarely looked back. But …
Private client firms are scrambling to bolster their arbitration capabilities six months after family law arbitration was introduced in England and Wales. Family lawyers are reporting arbitration training programmes are fully booked going into 2013. The Institute of Family Law Arbitrators (IFLA) launched the Family Law Arbitration Scheme in February this year as a viable …
Continue reading “Family law firms clamber to get arbitrators on board”
The increased global focus of governments on tax avoidance means a handful of international law firms have been pushing their transfer pricing practices to the fore recently. In July Macfarlanes announced the appointment of Martin Zetter to the new role of head of transfer pricing and senior economist in its tax and structuring group. Zetter …
Continue reading “Rule changes put transfer pricing practices centre stage”
Trowers & Hamlins senior partner elect Jennie Gubbins has told LB that she is looking to raise the firm’s corporate profile in the City and repair its ailing international offering after a bruising few years. The firm’s current senior partner, Jonathan Adlington, has announced that he will be retiring next year. Gubbins, currently head of …
Continue reading “Trowers unveils new strategy as Adlington bows out”
The CMS group, which passed a major milestone this summer when it provided its financial results as a single entity for the first time, has told LB that it is looking to drop local firm names to strengthen its international brand. ‘We have been looking at the risks of being regarded as a single firm …
