Wragge & Co’s decision to launch in Paris sees its notoriously prudent partnership taking a rare gamble. Legal Business reveals the ambitious new strategy now underpinning Birmingham’s largest legal powerhouse If you’re wearing a suit when you meet Quentin Poole you’ll feel overdressed. He looks more like a teacher than a lawyer: no jacket, top …
With some of the cornerstones of Swiss identity – banking and secrecy – under threat, the country’s law firms are caught up in the maelstrom. LB uncovers how Switzerland’s conservative legal community has been responding to the upheaval. Switzerland recently encountered its most significant period of economic turmoil, and its lawyers are right on the …
Positive discrimination for men? Only in Turkey. Legal Business analyses a legal market where female commercial lawyers almost always top the class The UK’s legal market has never been an easy place for female lawyers. This became abundantly clear in the 2009 LB100, which charts the UK’s top 100 law firms by revenue. Among these …
There’s no doubt that there was a hardening of the professional indemnity (PI) insurance market in the past year for firms outside the LB100. The advantages of the soft market have truly come to an end. Many smaller firms have been hit hard by the hikes in premiums, due primarily to the rising number of …
The reality for a number of firms is that up until now their risk teams have been wading through treacle to get their firms in shape. Now that the concept of effective risk management is universally recognised, the hard work begins for some: getting the appropriate level of support internally. To our survey question ‘What …
This section looks at the key risks identified by the top 150 firms in the UK in our third risk management survey. While last year client bankruptcy, credit problems and other recession-related fears dominated risk managers’ agendas, this year some of those fears may have abated. Of the potential risks identified by risk managers, the …
The legal sector has been warily assessing the possibility of outsourcing some services for several years. But with Slaughters now investigating the viability of LPOs, suddenly everyone is taking serious notice As recently as a year ago, the prospect of Slaughter and May outsourcing legal services overseas seemed as likely as a US president winning …
Despite the lip service paid to renewables, fossil fuels are far and away the leading source of global energy consumption. In the first part of LB’s global energy focus, we analyse the current trends in coal, natural gas and oil In December 2009 Copenhagen replaced beleaguered golf star Tiger Woods as the most popular search …
Responding to the relentless negative publicity directed at offshore territories, the International Financial Centres Forum was formally launched in London at the end of last year. Legal Business assesses the drivers behind this development and which offshore law firms have continued to expand despite the global economic crisis ‘The offshore world is tired of being …
The past ten years have brought unprecedented change to the legal profession. As we enter a new decade, Legal Business and Dublin’s McCann FitzGerald hosted a round table discussion of some of the key issues affecting firms now. As we leave behind one of the most tumultuous decades in the history of the legal profession, …
