Profits and revenue up at Latham & Watkins

Last year PEP at Latham was $1.993m, up from $1.907m in 2009. Total revenue also grew at Latham last year, up almost 6 per cent from $1.821bn to $1.929bn.

Firm chairman Bob Dell said the fact that there had been a $100m increase in the demand for Latham’s services during a year when the economy was “still pretty choppy” was “comforting”.

Dell said the demand had been “quite consistent” across the firm’s practices. M&A and capital markets performed more strongly in the second half of 2010, Dell added, while litigation, particularly government investigations and Latham’s global cartel practice, were strong throughout the year.

“We also opened three offices during the year without incurring any debt,” Dell added, referring to Latham’s launches in Houston, Riyadh and Beijing in 2010.

Cross-border transactional activity was up on 2009, Dell said, with an increasing number of deals leveraging off Latham’s global platform, “without any nexus to the US”.

Standout cross-border deals on which Latham worked last year included Spanish oil company Repsol’s $7.1bn sale to China’s Sinopec and London-based mining company Vedanta Resources’ $9.6bn acquisition of a controlling stake in Cairn Energy.

Latham also advised dairy and juice company Wimm-Bill-Dann in its 66 per cent acquisition by PepsiCo for $3.8bn, a deal which will establish PepsiCo as the largest food-and-beverage business in Russia and is thought to be the biggest foreign non-oil/gas investment in Russia ever.