Corporate head Charles Penney (pictured) has been appointed Addleshaw Goddard‘s new senior partner, replacing Monica Burch, who was first elected to the role in 2010.
KWM restructures London as Europe managing partner returns to full-time fee-earning
King & Wood Mallesons (KWM) is restructuring its London teams, which has delayed the election of a new European managing partner and comes amid cash flow problems in the legacy SJ Berwin practice.
The move comes as the firm rolls out its 2020 strategy, which KWM global managing partner Stuart Fuller described as setting ‘a vision to be in the global elite for the next century’.
‘We needed to move on’: Why Fieldfisher has turned its back on the dating game
Victoria Young speaks to the management duo about the transformed mid-market player
‘We’ll be the first to admit the firm of five years ago wasn’t delivering what the partners wanted,’ says Fieldfisher managing partner Michael Chissick. In 2012, Legal Business took a close look at Field Fisher Waterhouse and at the time the mid-market law firm was desperate for a suitor. Three years, two failed merger talks and several high-profile partner exits later, and Fieldfisher has undergone a reboot far beyond its change of name.
Continue reading “‘We needed to move on’: Why Fieldfisher has turned its back on the dating game”
News in brief – March 2016
EE LEGAL HEAD REVEALS PLANS POST-TELCO MERGER
Following BT’s high-profile £12.5bn takeover of UK mobile business EE, it has emerged the telco plans to consolidate external legal panels, while EE’s general counsel (GC) James Blendis has been appointed to BT’s legal leadership team. Blendis will now sit on BT’s legal leadership board, which comprises senior legal management, including group GC Dan Fitz.
City and Hong Kong members join Clifford Chance’s partnership council
Clifford Chance‘s partnership has elected City energy partner Jeremy Connick and corporate partner Neeraj Budhwani, who is based in Hong Kong, to its partnership council.
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Slaughters elects new M&A head to replace incoming senior partner Cooke
Slaughter and May has chosen Roland Turnill (pictured) as head of the firm’s M&A practice, replacing new senior partner Steve Cooke.
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The pitch – A new kind of global law firm emerges but can Dentons live up to the hype?
A dismissed also-ran, Dentons has improbably reinvented itself as a pioneer taking legal globalisation to new heights. Critics snipe but can the firm live up to the soaring rhetoric?
‘We’ve obviously grown faster than any law firm ever,’ says Dentons’ iconoclastic chair Joe Andrew as he loads up a presentation designed for potential global suitors. Sitting alongside chief executive and friend Elliott Portnoy they make a slick pair, unsurprising given that this presentation has been practised on more than 100 law firm leaders around the world. The batting average was impressive in 2015. In a breakthrough year, six law firms across the US, China, Australia, Singapore, Colombia and Mexico agreed to join Dentons in a spree without precedent in the legal industry. A law firm written off as a global player in most quarters had become on some measures the world’s largest firm. Actually, it achieved that distinction less than a month into 2015 with the headline-grabbing tie-up with 4,000-lawyer Chinese giant Dacheng. Many in the profession are quick to predict a dramatic fall for this empire but everyone is talking about a firm that two years ago didn’t get a second thought.
Myths and Millennials – the facts, fiction and hard realities of leading junior lawyers
Law firms are increasingly obsessed with the challenge of engaging their Millennial associates. Legal Business separates buzzword from BS
Just what is it that you want to do?
We wanna be free.
We wanna be free to do what we wanna do.
LOADED, PRIMAL SCREAM
It was a very different legal market in 2007 when Simon Harper and a group of colleagues at Berwin Leighton Paisner geared up for the launch of Lawyers On Demand (LOD). Amid boom time for legal services, few knew what to make of a flexi-lawyering business. Working on initial marketing, the idea was hit upon to draw on the famous freedom refrain from Primal Scream’s 1990 song Loaded (actually a sample from the cult film The Wild Angels). The intent was to reach a new generation of lawyers: a generation that in law and in other industries would increasingly be known as Millennials. The impact was immediate, recalls Harper. ‘What made LOD fly was the changing attitudes to work. Some of the CVs we got were amazing.’
Cooke: ‘Conveyor belt is not a phrase you will ever hear uttered at Slaughter and May’
Corporate veteran vows to maintain City focus when he succeeds Saul in May
The new senior partner at Slaughter and May, Stephen Cooke, has pledged to retain the firm’s City focus when he takes up his five-year term at the helm of the UK’s most profitable law firm in May.
The outlook for the quality UK mid-tier – the straight-up view from Legal Business
In discussion at a partnership conference, LB editor-in-chief Alex Novarese lays out the prospects for a UK mid-pack
I recently held a one-on-one discussion with the senior partner of a mid-tier UK player at the firm’s partnership conference. As part of the prep, we sketched out some outline questions for which I wrote some notes to order my thoughts. Since it was flowing conversation and I wasn’t looking at those notes, what is below only loosely relates to what was said on the day. But since I often get asked these kind of questions and such Q&As have an off-the-cuff accessibility, I thought it would make a decent article. Mid-weight law firms wanting to know the Legal Business take on the market, read on.
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