Links puts age before beauty
It was Linklaters’ week. Landing the Lehman administration with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and two days later acting for Lloyds TSB on its rescue of HBOS would have sent those faltering utilisation rates through the roof.
By the way, PwC ought to be grateful to Linklaters, because the word is that it was Links that gave Tony Lomas & co the job. A team from the magic circle firm spent the weekend of 13-14 September doing crisis planning over at Lehman. When Barclays withdrew and a banking collapse loomed, PwC was the obvious choice to be put in.
The Linklaters-PwC relationship goes back a long way. After all, when Tony Bugg was a new boy at Linklaters in the late 1990s, he made his name working with PwC on the celebrated Ionica administration. And Enron, with its complex transatlantic issues and fiendishly complicated derivatives trades, now looks like merely a dry run for the beast that is Lehman.
One of the more interesting facets of the press coverage of Lehman and HBOS last week was the way the media tide turned against the go-getters and in favour of the cautious old hands.
And it’s notable that the Linklaters team is a very senior one. I hope I’m not being indelicate when I observe that Matthew Middleditch, Richard Holden, Tony Bugg and David Ereira are all in their 50s, but all in all it’s a big hurrah for grey hair.
We all know that thrusting City types make great copy, but who would you rather have on your side in a crisis? Baby deal junkies or cooler, more experienced advisers? Suddenly, enforced retirement at 55 in City firms looks a little unwise, to say the least. (Are you listening, Freshfields?)
And there is another problem lurking. There isn’t a rising generation of insolvency and restructuring stars behind this one. Sure, there’s the odd younger partner who cut their teeth being number 14 on Marconi, say, but there’s no embarrassment of riches. There are always waves of up and coming corporate partners, but very few firms in London – apart from Bingham – have promoted into insolvency. But, as a specialism, it’s certainly making a comeback.
Readers' comments (2)
Broad-minded Observer | 22-Sep-2008 3:40 pm
Links succession planning
Nonsense! Guys in their early 50s, like the Linklaters team, are in the prime of their careers, or would be regarded as being so were it not for the fact that they work in the blinkered, ageist and inflexible magic circle where the ludicrous rules of lockstep dictate that as soon as you get to the top of the ladder, you're being elbowed out (or stabbed on the back, depending on how good or bad your sorporate culture is) by the greedy youngsters who don't understand why you should sit there creaming off the top of the profits whilst they're doing all the hard work and not being paid properly for the controbution they perceive themselves to be making!
]Is it any wonder that in firms which use a different (performance based) compensation model, there is room for thrusting young (well paid) partners to co-exist perfectly happily with partners who are still operating at full tilt well into their late fifties, sixties and in some cases even their seventies? When will the magic circle have the courage to wrestle with this moose on their collective tables?
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Devil's Advocate | 23-Sep-2008 5:53 pm
Yawn...
Oh dear, it appears that Broad-minded Observer is, in fact, anything but. "[B]linkered, ageist and inflexible"? How very strange that such organisations outnumber US firms in the global elite, and that such antiquated systems of lock-step have pushed Slaughters to pole position, and Freshfield and Linklaters to 4th and 5th, respectively, in global profit tables.
No magic circle firm will look to remove partners "who are still operating at full-tilt", regardless of age, but age in-and-of-itself is insufficient reason to retain partners who are not operating in such a fashion. It's a business, and it's a performance culture. If you can't perform, you need to go.
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