A&O: Back to the drawing board in US litigation
The collapse of merger talks between A&O and OMM raises questions about how the magic circle firm can achieve its ambitions for a global disputes team.
More heft needed for Bakers’ skinny M&A team
That quintessential London all-rounder, Baker McKenzie, has been prioritising corporate growth more than you realise.
Knights’ acquisition strategy is good for the share price, but is it disruptive?
There’s a fair wind behind Knights for 2020, as long as it keeps giving its investors that dopamine hit of acquisitions.
Cadwalader in the City: Start, stop, start again
Poor old Cadwalader. The US firm has just posted a drop in its London office revenue for the second year in a row, down 4 per cent from $43.1m to $41.3m. And while it’s only fair to say that it’s been hiring recently, it is equally true that Cadwalader is also still dealing with the […]
Occupy London headaches for Slaughters and Kirkland
What do Slaughters, Bakers, Kirkland, White & Case and Skadden have in common? A mighty, London office-shaped management headache. The lease on all of these firms’ City homes is due to expire by, at latest, 2026. And in the timeless words of Joe Strummer, the question for the leaders of these firms boils down to […]
HSF’s drift away from the City
Growth by big gesture is out of character for HSF, where gestation periods are habitually elephantine. The energy of 2011-12 when Herbert Smith launched on the Continent, in New York, and merged with Sydney-headquartered Freehills, was in retrospect a strategic fever-dream, not to be repeated. We have yet to see the hoped-for doubling of size […]
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CMS’s litigation blockage
The decision by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to move into Olswang’s former City offices in 2017 could prove symbolically important for its hiring strategy if CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang fails to unblock its disputes promotions pipeline soon. In the three years since CMS came together with Olswang and Nabarro, just eight of the […]
BCLP Paris: after the real estate hires comes the hard bit
Berwin Leighton Paisner’s desire to have a base in Paris was well known on both sides of the Channel long before its 2018 merger with Bryan Cave. Although the merger gifted BLP a small three-partner outlet in the French capital that was launched by the US firm in 2008, it was clear to the newly […]
Squires’ mystifying hires
You wait years for a corporate partner and then three come along at once.