13 December 2010

Kevin Hogarth
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Freshfields boosts diversity with a quarter BME intake

More than 25 per cent of the next intake of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer ­London trainees are from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds, according to the magic circle firm’s latest corporate social responsibility report. The latest figures mean that the proportion of trainees from BME backgrounds will have almost trebled in six years. In 2004 only 9 […]

Round up of the year 2010

After the storm: Consolidation and mergers have been the main themes of a positive 2010, with Halliwells providing enough negativity all by itself to balance out the year January Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer kicked off the year with a gender diversity initiative in a bid to improve its retention rate among female ­solicitors. Mid-sized firms got […]

Chris Hale

Ashurst, Travers, SJ Berwin land Candover Partners divestment

Ashurst, SJ Berwin and Travers Smith secured the key mandates on the ­spinning off of Candover Investments’ private equity investment management division Candover Partners Ltd (CPL) and the ­subsequent investment into the new vehicle by private equity fund Pantheon. Ashurst advised longstanding client Candover Investments on the sale of CPL to Arle Capital Partners as part of its […]

1

Competition practices shape up as regulators take centre stage in 2010

OFT fights back against threat of extinction with mixed results. With corporate dealflow showing little sign of returning in any major way, 2010 was an opportunity for competition practices to take centre stage. While a few big pieces of M&A kept competition watchdogs relatively busy – not least the Kraft takeover of Cadbury and the merger of […]

Simmons global finance chief becomes top dog

Simmons & Simmons has elected head of its international financial markets practice Jeremy Hoyland as its next managing partner. Hoyland won a two-way race against Germany chief Hans-Hermann Aldenhoff and will take up the post in April 2011 once incumbent Mark Dawkins steps down after two terms in the role. Both Hoyland and Aldenhoff hail […]

Rouse Oxford team forms new boutique

A team of three lawyers from IP firm Rouse’s Oxford brands practice has broken away to set up a boutique based in the city.The three-partner ­boutique, Sipara, was launched last week, with the firm claiming that 18 Rouse clients have, or are in the process of, migrating over. Sipara has been launched by Rouse’s former commercial IP head […]

Don’t quote me on that

“We were approached on a potential job which we pitched for and didn’t get, but they were impressed with what we put in front of them.” Basket of muffins was it? Tickets to We Will Rock You? Come on, Hogan Lovells corporate partner Steven Bryan, you can tell us. (City column, 4 October) “One partner […]

Authority figures add up

If you’d said in 2007 that local authority legal directors would emerge as the profession’s most imaginative group of lawyers, most people would have gone slack-jawed in amazement. And yet in the past three years those same lawyers, so long regarded as somehow inferior to their richer City cousins, have consistently responded to crisis and […]

Web heads: the rise of the machines

The last year has been TheLawyer.com’s best ever, with figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations showing that the site now has 235,425 unique users. More stories than ever were broken online, leading to more in-depth analysis of the news for the print ­edition of The Lawyer. On 8 February, The Lawyer.com brought you news […]

Martyn Day
2

Costs Office to rule on Leigh Day’s Trafigura fee

The Senior Courts Costs Office has heard all the evidence and must now decide if the ’massive risk’ run by Leigh Day & Co justifies the firm’s 100 per cent uplift totalling £105m. One of the most controversial cases of the decade is being heard by senior costs judge Master Hurst and Mr Justice MacDuff […]

Bridget Treacy

EU needs to seize the day with fit-for-purpose privacy laws

Last year the former UK Information Commissioner Richard Thomas ­controversially characterised the EU’s Data Protection Directive as “no longer fit for purpose”, triggering a review by the European Commission.  The first staging post towards ­legislative reform was the Commission’s long-awaited communication proposing “acomprehensive approach on personal data protection”, published on 4 ­November. This is […]

1

A&O adamant derivatives albatross can still take off

There is something that seems ill-fated about Allen & Overy’s (A&O) foray into the derivatives services sector. Back at the beginning of the last decade the firm established derivatives risk analysis business Derivative Services. It was set up soon after star partner Dan ­Cunningham joined from Cravath Swaine & Moore, with a view to him […]