Transatlantic tie-ups have slowed local growth for UK legacy firms
US-UK mergers can be divided into two waves: pre- and post-Hogan Lovells.
Bird & Bird’s succession taboo rings alarm bells
Politics is the juice of law firms. Publicly, lawyers will disdain discussions of partnership hierarchies and the individuals within them; privately, they relish them. And why not? Firm politics, the distillation of the personal and organisational, both illuminates and shapes strategy. It’s worth, then, paying attention to the terms people use when describing their firm’s […]
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Comment: Flexible working isn’t just for women – inclusion in law firms is about age too
Gender, gender, gender: how firms retain female talent is a board-level discussion point. The born-again evangelism among managing partners isn’t feigned, I grant you, but it’s pretty one-note, as if the rhetoric of anxiety makes up for the distinct lack of solutions. To complicate matters further, other diversity issues are beginning to emerge. Just as […]
New dawn, new challenges for the Clifford Chance disputes team
The Clifford Chance litigation team has finally got something it can talk about that isn’t Excalibur.
Freshfields lockstep reform: Now it can finally hire the finance lawyers it needs
If Freshfields doesn’t pick off other magic circle lawyers, lockstep reform will be a waste
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What 30 years of The Lawyer tells us: feminist pressure worked
We can broadly divide the past 30 years of the UK legal sector into three phases: innocence and enthusiasm; expansion and over-reach; and chastened realism.
Success in the PRC market needs more than a speed-read of Sun Tzu
Failure is fashionable. Last month Amazon’s innovation head was jut the latest to gather headlines when he declared that the willingness to fail was a necessary part of success. So in the spirit of celebrating failure, let’s have a look at international firms in China.
Stop knocking Ashurst. Going global made sense – and it’s changed the mid-tier
What became of the silver circle? It shrunk. Back in 2005 we created the term silver circle as a shorthand for firms that were UK domestic-focused with a strong UK client base, often private equity, and high profits. Twelve years on, just two firms have stuck to the same model.
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The secret club that will rule the legal world is nothing but myth
The social function of myth is to bolster a value system in which a person or organisation has a meaningful place. Unsurprisingly, the legal sector has plenty of these myths, but rather than taking account of the sheer messiness of the global legal market, too much strategy discussion is based on erroneous beliefs rather than hard evidence.
Comment: Forget the money, the UK-US battle is now about culture
Forget the money: culture is the new battleground for US and UK firms in London.
European 100 2017: Firms still need the Euro vision
Loath as one is to shoehorn last June’s referendum vote into everything, the prospect of a hard Brexit is suddenly concentrating the minds of UK law firms.
The mid-tier is right to fear PwC
You can’t fault PwC’s chutzpah. Last week it announced that it was taking on half of GE’s worldwide tax team in a managed services deal that was described by Harvard Law’s David Wilkins as another example of ‘the rapid blurring of the boundaries between what used to be thought of as separate and distinct professional […]