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Travers Smith sees PEP soar by 24 per cent at end of strong 2011-12

Anon | 17-Jul-2012 12:06 pm - While the turnover at these firms may have increased, this doesn't necessarily mean they have been more successful than TS. HS in particular has seen a steady decrease in the equity/non-equity ratio (meaning their PEP is pretty misleading). As these firms get bigger they employ a larger proportion of juniors meaning that partnership prospects become more and more remote. Also, because they promote themselves as big enough to handle any job, they need to retain a lot of spare capacity (meaning they don't necessarily benefit from scale). By way of example, Freshfields will soon have to find enough work for the 200+ lawyers who have been working on the olympics... Firms like TS, however, can pick and choose their work and don't need to feel that they have to offer massive fee discounts to banks etc just so they can crow about their client roster. From the recent list of mergers it seems that it is the firms otherwise falling by the wayside who are desperately trying to bulk up. I think we will find that one average firm plus another average firm just equals a larger average firm...

17-Jul-2012

12:55 pm