Allen & Overy has made 20 promotions to the partnership this year, forty per cent of whom are women.
This is a fall in the total number of promotions at the firm from last year, when A&O made up 28. However, the proportion of new women partners has reached record levels. Last year four of those made up, or 14 per cent, were women. This year the total number of new female partners has doubled to eight.
Allen & Overy recently made over 400 job cuts globally, around half of which were based in London in a process which cost the firm £44m. It also de-merged the private client practice.
Senior partner David Morley said: “Clearly we are navigating through a very challenging time for the business, but throughout the global restructuring process we have been clear about the need to invest in the future of our firm. These new partners are among our brightest talent around the world and I am delighted to welcome them to the partnership. I am especially glad to see a record percentage of women promoted to the partnership.”
London accounted for a minority of the promotions this year, where eight were made up. Last year the firm made up 28.
Morley commented on the reasons behind the emphasis on overseas offices: “Despite the ongoing turmoil in the global financial markets, we still believe that our global model and strategy of international growth is right,” he said. “Last year, over 50 per cent of our turnover was generated outside the UK and over 70 per cent of partner promotions were international. This year, again, 70 per cent of new partners are based outside the UK, demonstrating the continued investment in our international network.”
The firm made a high number of promotions in practices serving markets that have been hardest hit by the global economic downturn. Eleven promotions were made in banking and ICM.
“We have said all along that we must continue to invest in the future of our business – and these promotions demonstrate our desire to be in the strongest possible position when the markets pick up, as they will,” Morley added.
The new partners are:
Amsterdam
Ellen Cramer-de Jong (ICM)
Beijing
Yvonne Ho (Banking)
Frankfurt
Gernot Wagner (Corporate)Mark Manson-Bahr (Banking)
Sven Pruefer (Corporate)
Hamburg
Nadine Herrmann (Corporate)
London
Gordon Milne (Corporate)
Lorraine Ball (Banking)
Parya Badie (ICM)
Richard Farnhill (Litigation)
Tim Conduit (ICM)
Pavel Shevtsov (Banking)
Luxembourg
Patrick Mischo (Tax)
Moscow
Anton Konnov (Corporate)
Elena Tchoubykina (Banking)
Paris
Christine Poyer (Banking)
Hervé Ekué (ICM)
Laetitia Benard (Litigation)
Singapore
Harry Upcott (Banking)
Tokyo
Ashley Young (Banking)
You can accuse A&O of many things but not of racism or sexism when it comes to partner promotions. Its about time that The Lawyer investigated why some firms in the top 10 (their names are obvious so I won’t mention them!) haven’t made up any non-white partners in their London offices for the last 5 years whereas other have given equal opportunity to all their associates. The guilty firms (and they know who they are) have got to stop hiding behind “global” statistics and come clean about the reasons for not making up non-white partners in London.
More women at A&O????
Wonderful PR campaign by A&O. Really quite special. The truth is that the VAST majority of the 100+ fee earners let go in the London office over the past few weeks were women. Oh, and plenty of them had children or worked part time.
I wonder why A&O won’t publish details of how many redundancy victims were female?
The truth is, if you are a working mum at A&O, you are doomed to fail. Unless you put off having children until after partnership. And even then, you are at risk of being unfairly binned beforehand.
A&O timed their announcement on the same day as the last working day of most of the redundancy victims. It’s no coincidence – just an elaborate way of covering up their vicious culls.
I geniunely used to think A&O was a better workplace but now I know it is just as cut-throat as the rest of the other big firms.