CC, DLA and Simmons lose out as Jumeirah revamps legal panel

Readers' comments (19)

• Anonymous | 1-Sep-2010 3:43 pm

  Any more than four or five firms on a legal panel is pure over-kill and generally a sign of a general counsel trying to friends and ex-colleagues a favour, or worse.

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• Anonymous | 1-Sep-2010 5:37 pm

  Ooops ... another piece of bad news for DLA in the sand.

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• Anonymous | 1-Sep-2010 7:52 pm

  A sign of the times that clients will continue with further rationalisation of global panels to reduce costs. Further, clients will dictate terms of billings and law firms will need to meet client demands given the fixed billing schedule on offer. There's no doubt, lawyers will need to become more commercially astute and think with an MBA hat on.

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• Anonymous | 2-Sep-2010 8:56 am

  The firms also had to show that they could service the hotel chain in all the jurisdictions in which it operates.
  Mayer Brown do not have offices in the ME.
  Weil Gotshal has a token 2 lawyer office in Dubai.

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• Anonymous | 2-Sep-2010 11:45 am

  These firms will not receive much work. It's just another elaborate profile-raising exercise by an ambitious head of legal.

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• Anonymous | 2-Sep-2010 4:42 pm

  I agree with the previous comment. I bet these firms are secretly delighted - I worked in Dubai at the time of the original panel process and it was classic Middle East showboating - an elaborate process where something like 22 firms were whittled down to only (!) 12; even if the credit-crunch hadn't hit Dubai a few months later, Jumeirah doesn't outsource much work so a panel of that size was entirely unjustified and i heard that the panel firms had to provide training and jump through administrative hoops which were totally disproportionate to the fees they were getting. Oh, and the conference organised for "building close ties with panel firms"? never happened.

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• Anonymous | 2-Sep-2010 6:30 pm

  In a part of the world where in-house lawyers are still trying to gain the same recognition as their UK and US counterparts, well done Jumeirah for adopting such a progressive approach to the procurement of legal services. I have seen an increase in the number of my clients in the region who are asking for creative cost control initiatives and additional services, such as training and secondments - something which does not sit comfortably with many firms in the region.

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• Anonymous | 3-Sep-2010 5:54 am

  Anon 11.45 and 4.42 are clearly sour grapes lawyers from either cc, dla or s&s...

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• Anonymous | 3-Sep-2010 12:14 pm

  Or they could simply be people who've encountered the Jumeirah oddballs!

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• Anonymous | 6-Sep-2010 4:00 pm

  ...or, they could just be right. Seems like an honest opinion has been given and that is that in-house HoLs are jumped up ego-craving cookie monsters.
  We did a pitch a short while ago for a VERY prestigious client, but lost out to a good regional firm. No sour grapes over losing out to the other firm, other than we were better...(!)
  Sour grapes due to the way in which the pitch target's director (who was also a surveyor by trade) handled the entire affair, had us march down to see them at their offices and basically bum steered us because of the fact that our firm was less well known (but equally capable by the pitch taget's director's own admission).
  Love Oscar the Grouch.

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