Alex is The Lawyer’s international editor. He joined in 2017 as a reporter covering litigation and the Bar, leaving in 2019 and returning in 2021.
Reed Smith is opting for 70 per cent open-plan space in its new building, transforming the way the firm’s London office is fitted out when it moves home this summer. The move is in stark contrast to the way the firm currently operates in its Broadgate Tower office, which is majority cellular, reflecting a significant […]
The fate of King & Wood Mallesons’ (KWM) final European office has been decided with the firm’s Madrid partners joining Addleshaw Goddard. KWM’s 13-partner Madrid office will join Addleshaws next month, launching the UK firm’s first office in Spain. The new office will be led by KWM Spain managing partner and corporate/M&A lawyer Roberto Pomares. […]
Kinstellar started the year in fine form. If its acquisition of a Vietnamese firm was a big move for it to break into the Southeast Asian market, the acquisition of four offices from German independent Noerr was positively enormous as a statement of intent. There was also a lovely symmetry to the acquisition as the […]
Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison’s rapid growth in London is now translating to the Continent, as the firm has hired a Simpson Thacher & Bartlett partner to launch an office in Brussels. Simpson Thacher partner Ross Ferguson will join the growing European partner base at Paul Weiss. Jason Glover, London office head at Simpson […]
Welcome to The Passport, your regular round-up of the most important stories to come from the European legal market. In this edition, we have a Kinstellar sandwich on Parisien bread. We look at how August Debouzy’s latest phase of international development is taking shape; a glimpse at arguably Europe’s most expansionist firm’s foray into Southeast […]
Vinge’s Maria-Pia Hope has left the Swedish firm after stepping down as CEO after 12 years in the role. Hope’s final day at the firm was 31 March with her successor, banking and finance partner Louise Brorsson Salomon, stepping into her shoes on 1 April. Having joined the firm in 1996, Hope made partner seven […]
Scandinavian firm Hannes Snellman has finalised the split between its Swedish and Finnish businesses, citing “a divergence of the business strategies…in Helsinki and Stockholm”. The firm announced in February 2024 that the split would take place and the necessary arrangements have taken place splitting the offices into two distinct entities under the Hannes Snellman operating […]
Gianni & Origoni partners have voted in favour of making wholesale changes to the firm’s management and remuneration structures as a wave of modernisation continues to wash across the Italian legal sector. The changes will see a new management committee established, as well as both expanding the number and diversifying the members of the firm’s […]
Welcome to The Passport, your regular round-up of all the most important stories to come from the European legal market. In this edition, litigators have been moving en masse in Paris this year and we take a look into one of the bigger moves; Denmark’s Plesner passed the psychologically impactful DKK1bn mark for the first […]
It was one year ago that the news broke about the sudden liberalisation of the Indian legal market. Excitement was cautious and few expected anything drastic, but it was a crucial first step in the market opening up. It’s been on plenty of firms’ minds since, as was illustrated by Osborne Clarke’s hire of Charles […]
The Dutch legal market is uber conservative; it has witnessed little by way of disruption to force the kind of sweeping changes seen here in London. Amsterdam is not the city where firms can rack up mega fees; big-ticket M&A work is not done there as often as it is here. That said, if you’ve […]
Few firms exist that haven’t consulted their people on the topic of ‘values’ in recent years. Against a backdrop of hybrid working, values are treated as a magic glue that somehow binds people together. But when a law firm managing partner decides to put ‘respect’ on the agenda, vowing that his firm must be the […]