Practice Analysis – Our Insights

Uncover strategic insights with the new Practice Analysis. Explore the dimensions of your practice, dissect your efficiency and benchmark against your competitors.
Paul Hastings

Paul Hastings swipes Latham’s disputes chief

Paul Hastings has hired two disputes partners from Latham & Watkins, including its London head of litigation. Oliver Browne, who has been co-chair of Latham’s London litigation practice since 2018, and Stuart Alford KC, former head of banking fraud at the Serious Fraud Office, are set to join Paul Hastings. Browne leaves Latham after 18 […]

Revealed: The partnerships with the best corporate pipeline

Three US firms can claim to have the most junior corporate partnerships in the UK, data from The Lawyer can reveal, highlighting stark differences between the investment strategies of the nation’s transactional teams. Kirkland & Ellis has the youngest corporate partnership overall, as a result of its quicker route to non-equity at around six years’ […]

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Bryony Theaker, Clifford Chance

“You suddenly find yourself quite senior”: A Clifford Chance associate reflects on her time in-house

Tallying up two maternity leaves and an 11-month stint in-house, Clifford Chance project finance senior associate Bryony Theaker spent the best part of the pandemic out of private practice. While lawyers may once have associated progression with office visibility, the dial has shifted. Indeed, Theaker explains that she returned from her secondment at interconnector Greenlink […]

Jing Wei Luo: “Do the work and opportunity will find you.”

Many starting lawyers will come into the profession comforted by the promise of a stable, straight-forward career where the next steps are clearly laid ahead towards the golden ticket of partnership. But for KHP Ventures new head of legal and operations, Jing Wei Luo, his career has been spent moving back and forth between private […]

Linklaters

Becoming a partner at Linklaters

With revenue of £1.9bn and profit per equity partner sat at £1.8m, it is easy to see why partnership at Linklaters is considered to be a golden ticket. So what is the likelihood of you making partner at Linklaters? On average, it makes 14 partners in the UK each year, with the past two years […]

calendar pages

Litigators wait longer to make partnership

Disputes lawyers are back in fashion, yet being a litigator can hinder a lawyer’s partnership prospects. Corporate lawyers are more likely to switch firms than their litigator friends, and they are rewarded for that by being made up to partner at a much faster rate, analysis from The Lawyer Practice Analysis shows. The snapshot view […]

DACB and DWF are piling on debt but gaining market share

Utilising debt to finance growth is an uneasy concept for the legal profession. The booming cash reserves of the last year have done little to assuage this; lawyers would prefer firms use that money to make investments rather than take it from a lender. Bucking the trend here is a Top 30 duo that has […]

Your juniors need you

The physical manifestation of how firms are adapting their approach to learning and development for the hybrid workforce is evident in how firms are reimagining their offices. As well as adding a plethora of mod cons, they are drifting away from the traditional office floor space design. It may not be to everyone’s liking, but […]

You all want to be Slaughter and May’s clients

The last few years have been record-breaking for law firm office moves. In 2021 and 2022, law firms agreed leases on 2.85m sq ft of City space, according to property specialist Knight Frank. Demand hasn’t peaked just yet, however, with a raft of US City firms now looking for fresh digs to call home. Competition […]

Revealed: CMS redundancies included a lawyer on maternity leave

New details have emerged around the cohort of associates made redundant from CMS last autumn. Sources have told The Lawyer that the group of corporate lawyers let go in the September 2023 consultation round included an associate in the early days of her maternity leave. Other accounts reveal that at least one among the discharged […]

Puzzle

City talk: The Weil jobshare is an elegant fudge

Does nobody really want Mike Francies’ job? Or has Weil Gotshal & Manges been incredibly diplomatic in its choice of two London managing partners? The firm has appointed corporate duo David Avery-Gee and Jonathan Wood to share the top office role. The two incoming leaders will have a year with Francies before he retires. They […]

Spotlight: Eversheds’ sanctions team goes global

This February marked the two-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the single largest imposition of sanctions by the international community as a result. This week, we focus on Eversheds’ sanctions team, with over 60 lawyers handling matters worldwide. The market: Sanctions compliance is vital for any entity doing business on an international scale, […]

Defence chess

Spotlight: Meet the Freshfields team defending the most class actions

As revealed exclusively by The Lawyer, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer has the most defence side mandates in Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) amid a booming class actions market. We laser in on the team on call.  The market: The interchange fee collective action, brought by class representative Walter Merricks on behalf of 45.5 million UK Mastercard customers, is […]

Metaverse

Spotlight: Step into the metaverse with Bird & Bird

After the excitement of new technologies such as NFTs, AI, and 5G comes the slow and arduous legal work of finding out who owns what and who’s getting paid; this is where Bird & Bird’s intellectual property team steps in. The market: Standard-essential patents (SEPs) are the bread and butter of the IP market, setting technical […]

airplanes

Spotlight: Morgan Lewis takes on the war in the sky

This week on Spotlight, we check out the aviation disputes team at Morgan Lewis & Bockius as it brings a large number of operator policy claims against insurers in the mammoth Russian aviation litigation, which featured in The Lawyer’s top 20 cases of 2024.  The market: Aviation is both an extremely international and consistently high-value industry. An issue […]