Eastern promises
Who’d want to live in the Middle East? Not quite enough of you, it would seem. On paper it should be an easy sell. Work in London is dropping off and the growth is overseas – what better protection from all those redundancies masquerading as performance reviews?
What’s more, competition for partnership in the City is intense, so making your name in a smaller but strategically crucial office would be an obvious option.
And yet law firm managers all say the same thing: persuading non-partners to move east is incredibly difficult.
Clifford Chance boss David Childs told The Lawyer last year that he wanted to introduce more mobility around the network, but that initiative has yet to build up the head of steam he would like. It’s not helped by turf mentality in London, where certain group heads in City firms balk at the idea of losing good associates to foreign parts.
There’s another problem: Dubai is a great place to do business, but Dubai still ain’t London. The infrastructure isn’t all there yet and there’s precious little metropolitan high culture outside a multiplex – although neighbouring Qatar is reportedly setting up a symphony orchestra.
As a gay mate of mine once said (not entirely facetiously), a side-benefit of firms being gay-friendly should be a bigger pool of lawyers unencumbered by childcare issues – and therefore able to up sticks. But even this isn’t the case. “They’re all in civil partnerships with beautiful houses in Kensington,” laments one managing partner. Plus, of course, Middle Eastern attitudes to homosexuality are not quite what Stonewall would endorse.
US firms routinely offer signing-on bonuses for being relocated, but until now most UK firms have been cutting individual deals with associates, promising relatively short stays abroad and hoping they’ll love it once they get there.
Now, in a first, Denton Wilde Sapte is explicitly promising career enhancements for moving east. As the firm has realised, the art of persuasion rests on reward – a couple of years in the heat in return for partnership seems a pretty good deal. Let’s hope it doesn’t come over as desperate.
Readers' comments (7)
Gay lawyer | 28-Jul-2008 1:22 pm
Gays in the middle east: missed opportunity?
Firms waste the opportunities presented by gay lawyers who don't have children and thus might be more prepared to move to the Middle East by not being more proactive in defending homosexuality and standing by their gay lawyers in the region.
Homosexuality might be out-lawed under (readings of) Islam, but it is also against (traditional readings of) Christianity, yet gay people won rights in the West even when people here were a lot more Christian than they are today.
Middle Eastern business needs Western law firms as much as Western law firms need Middle Eastern business - if law firms banded together they could promote equality effectively, but so far individual businesses are unwilling to do this because they fear they will simply lose business to their rivals.
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Lawrence | 28-Jul-2008 1:54 pm
London, Paris, New York... Dubai?
Dubai is the most liberal of all the middle eastern locales and even that is not a very pleasant place to live. The reason? It's a cultural wasteland that 20 years ago was a pile of sand-dunes. You can create a business park out of nothing, but you can't create a city.
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Assistant | 28-Jul-2008 1:56 pm
Tax free living and partnership in two years?
Stop whining, lawyers - that would work for me.
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Phil Istein | 28-Jul-2008 3:52 pm
I agree
I'm with the last poster and disagree with the one before: you might tell themselves that they couldn't possible leave London or Paris because of the culture, but unless you've been to an art gallery, a performance or a historical building in the last two months, you're just kidding yourself that you still do.
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Al Awyer | 29-Jul-2008 3:51 pm
Let them go!
Turf mentality is definitely right at some firms, but keeping associates at home is ultimately self-defeating as if your firm can't make any money overseas when it needs to, partners in the City, Houston or Manhattan will suffer at year-end just as much as those overseas. For the sake of everybody, let them go where the work is.
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Mike | 29-Jul-2008 4:12 pm
last post
that's less true at many US firms, which have an eat-what-you-kill remuneration policy instead of a lockstep so making sure your own team does well is more important than the firm as a whole
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Simon | 30-Jul-2008 10:17 pm
Give it a go!
I went out to work as a lawyer in Dubai between 1993-1996. I got no credit for it at the time and my career has never recovered, although I will never ever regret the experience - the lifestyle, the culture and the mix of people you will meet are just beyond belief.
Now that Dubai is a definite career option, those having the chance to go out there and still pursue their careers in the UK would be crazy not to give it a go for a couple of years or so.
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