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Eversheds defends latest outsourcing

The editorial in the Lawyer yesterday (18.1.10) was spot-on. Eversheds is trying to do what most car manufacturers gave up trying to do in the 1980s: try to have a City runabout and a top-end sports car with the same badge on them. It ain't gonna work guys. With 735 redundancies to show for itself (costing just how much...) in the recession, the shine has certainly come off the Eversheds dream, and one wonders how many of the firm's vaunted Magic Circle hires are left in the decimated London office. Eversheds had a great brand, solid and functional, with a good reputation in its core services. Its ambition to go head-to-head with the Magic Circle was hubristic and doomed from the word 'go'. Now it seems to have a crisis of identity, and it will be interesting to see how the new leadership resolves this. Let it lick its wounds and focus on commoditised work to repair some of the damage, but I suspect that it will turn around in a year's time to find many of its stars have departed and it will be faced with some stark choices in terms of 'where next'.

19-Jan-2010

2:33 pm