Dentons

SNR Denton is due to merge with European firm Salans and Canadian firm Fraser Milner Casgrain (FMC) in 2013 and will be known under the Dentons name.

This merger follows the earlier transatlantic merger between Denton Wilde Sapte and Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal in September 2010 as many firms looked to strengthen their numbers in the wake of the recession.

The latest merger is due to go live on 1 March but the firms have opted to delay indefinitely the integration of partners into geographically defined profit pools.

In 2011 SNR Denton posted a global turnover of $658.5m (£424.3m) and had 1,214 global lawyers worldwide. Under the newly merged Dentons brand the firm is set to have a headcount of more than 2,500 lawyers spanning 52 countries across Africa, Asia Pacific, Canada, Europe and Central Asia, the Middle East, the UK and the US.

In the run-up to the merger the firm decreased the average number of employees across its UK LLP — which includes its Europe, Middle East and Africa operations — by 9.1 per cent to 994 in the 2011–12 financial year. This, alongside several other cost-cutting measures, boosted the firm's profit before tax by 39.6 per cent, from £22.5m to £31.4m.

Further afield, following an unsettled period for SNR Denton's Kuwait office the firm announced in January 2013 that it was replacing its existing association agreement in Kuwait with International Legal Group with an association local lawyer Jamal Ahmed Al-Shehab.