What’s your background? Did you always want to be a lawyer and how did you first enter the profession? I was born and raised in Accra, Ghana and educated there until secondary school. My father was a civil servant (now retired) and my mother owns and runs a nursery school. For tertiary education, I went […]
Managing partner James Knight featured in The Lawyer’s Hot 100 this year after floating Keystone Law on the London Stock Exchange.
Darren Rosier, recently appointed KWM’s new managing partner, recalls his training contract at Slaughter and May.
Stewarts family partner Sam Longworth featured in The Lawyer Hot 100 after a string of roles in major divorce cases.
Huawei Technologies’ Chen Yun featured in The Lawyer Hot 100 for being integral to the telecoms giant’s success in the UK.
Name: Karima Fahmy Position: General counsel Organisation: Grosvenor Estates Trained at: Lovells In the Hot 100 for: Leading Grosvenor’s legal team to help deliver a series of headline transactions. Read her full Hot 100 profile. What’s your most vivid memory from being a trainee? I was on secondment to the Brussels office of Lovells (as it was then) […]
Name: Maria Ludkin Position: Chief Counsel Organisation: WaveOptics (formerly at GMB) In Hot 100 for: As GMB’s head of legal, fighting valiantly for workers’ rights. Read her full Hot 100 profile here. What’s your most vivid memory from being a trainee? My supervising partner having early confidence in me and giving me my own cases to work on. I […]
Name: Daniel Brook Firm: Hogan Lovells Position: Partner Trained at: Hogan Lovells In Hot 100 for: Eli Lilly’s landmark patent trial against Actavis. Read his full Hot 100 profile. What’s your most vivid memory from being a trainee? I was a trainee at Hogan Lovells. During one of my seats, my supervisor gave me a model London […]
Name: May Smith Firm: Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer Position: Partner Trained at: Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer In Hot 100 for: Newly promoted partner tipped for greatness. Read her full Hot 100 profile. What’s your most vivid memory from being a trainee? It all remains pretty vivid. On the work side, a great variety of interesting work in areas of […]
Mitie GC Peter Dickinson featured in The Lawyer Hot 100 after stepping up to become its acting CEO in unforeseen circumstances.
Name: Katherine Moir Firm: Clifford Chance Position: Partner Trained at: Macfarlanes In Hot 100 for: Work on complex transactions, particularly in relation to listed plcs. Read her full Hot 100 profile. What’s your most vivid memory from being a trainee? Doing my first deal as lead executive while on secondment at 3i. The deal value was […]
Senior partner Mark Humphries appeared in The Lawyer Hot 100 for breaking the traditional law firm model with Humphries Kerstetter.
Name: Karon Monaghan QC Position: Barrister Firm: Matrix Chambers In Hot 100 for: Work for Unison against the Government in its four-year battle over Employment Tribunal fees. Read her full Hot 100 profile. What’s your most vivid memory from being a pupil? My most vivid memory of being a pupil? Confronting my pupil supervisor about his requirement that […]
Herbert Smith Freehills partner Kirsten Massey featured in The Lawyer’s Hot 100 for her role on the £12bn RBS rights issue litigation.
Stephenson Harwood litigation partner Ros Prince appeared in The Lawyer Hot 100 for playing a critical role in the firm’s fraud practice..
Name: Justine Campbell Organisation: Centrica Position: Deputy Group General Counsel Trained at: Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer In Hot 100 for: Transforming Centrica’s legal function. Read her full Hot 100 entry. What’s your most vivid memory from being a trainee? Almost losing a EU Merger notification document – Form CO – in Heathrow airport. In 1993 we had […]
Name: Roger Barron Position: Partner Firm: Paul Hastings In Hot 100 for: More mega-deals for long-standing client National Grid. Read his full Hot 100 profile. What’s your most vivid memory from being a trainee/pupil? I was a trainee in the early 1990s and the main memories are of being allowed great responsibility on deals – sometimes […]
Nursing and Midwifery Council barrister Matthew Cassells recalls a very different training experience from pupils in chambers.
Name: Rebecca Ferguson Position: Partner Firm: Gordon Dadds Trained at: Clifford Chance In Hot 100 for: Helping Gordon Dadds float on AIM. Read her full Hot 100 profile. What’s your most vivid memory from being a trainee? I remember the very early days of being a trainee when the days in the office seemed incredibly intense […]
CMS’s Adam Greaves on the shift in attitudes between 1980s AIDS related hatred of gay men to the near normalisation of gay issues today.
Openness about sexual orientation is good for the diversity agenda – but what if you simply want to keep your private life, well, private?
Name: Chris Whiteley Position: Managing partner Firm: Trethowans In Hot 100 for: Leading Trethowans to bumper financial results last year. Read his full Hot 100 profile. What’s your most vivid memory from being a trainee? I recall being asked to serve a Bankruptcy Notice as I happened to live near the person being made bankrupt. They […]
Luke Williams’ introduction to the profession was a tough one, but working in legal education has proved a heartening experience.
Forsters partner Natasha Rees featured in The Lawyer Hot 100 for her role on one of the year’s most high-profile trials.
The murder of an LGBT man in the 1950s had repercussions for Chris Williams, now a business services manager at BCLP.
Crown Estate GC Rob Booth featured in The Lawyer Hot 100 this year for leading his legal team through a raft of major deals.
Name: Amy Jacks Firm: DLA Piper Position: Partner Trained at: DLA In Hot 100 for: Rising through the ranks to play a pivotal role in the development of DLA Piper’s core financial sector team. Read her full Hot 100 profile. What’s your most vivid memory from being a trainee/pupil? Being sent out on site shortly […]
Name: Kiran Bhogal Firm: Hill Dickinson Position: Partner In Hot 100 for: Successfully building Hill Dickinson’s health practice. Read her full Hot 100 profile. What’s your most vivid memory from being a trainee? Being told how to break into centrally locked cars while interviewing a client in Armley prison – thankfully not had to put this […]
Name: Vicky Sandry Organisation: Sky Position: General counsel Trained at: McKenna & Co In Hot 100 for: A series of successful innovations in the legal team at Sky. Read her full Hot 100 profile. What’s your most vivid memory from being a trainee? I was a trainee at what was then McKenna & Co, and I […]
Liverpool headquartered Weightmans has enjoyed a comfortable few years, which has seen it keep hold of its position of as one of the UK’s top 50 firms by revenue.
Paul Jenkins was a bold choice for managing partner, and now he’s running the firm during one of the most turbulent periods in its history.
The story of the re-entry of the Big Four accountancy firms into legal services has occupied many minds in the last year or so. But in the UK, there is one notable absence – Deloitte. While its rivals EY, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers have all been busy hiring senior lawyers from top private practice firms Deloitte has stayed away from the UK market.
Last November Irwin Mitchell announced that it was acquiring southeast firm Thomas Eggar. The deal gave the northern-focused Irwin Mitchell an additional six offices in the south of England and has boosted the firm’s turnover to £250m.
Allen & Overy’s (A&O) new management outlined their strategy to partners last month in the 45-degree Dubai heat. But what were the hot topics on the agenda?
Private prosecution boutique Edmonds Marshall McMahon caused a stir earlier this year after it made the biggest lateral hires in its short history.
Orrick’s global boss and London head talk about bringing the firm’s base in the capital up to scratch to meet the needs of global clients, Microsoft and Instagram.
Linklaters’ new managing partner Gideon Moore speaks out about his plans to review everything at the firm to “check that what we’re doing still makes sense”.
Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) launched a new plan of action on Thursday (28 April) that gave an enticing hint at its plans for expansion in the US.
Manchester has become a competitive breeding ground for back office-style legal processing centres and Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) wants to be one of the city’s biggest players.
Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman is among a minority of international firms to have by-passed Hong Kong and entered into Greater China via an office in Shanghai. Six years after its 2006 launch in Shanghai, the firm expanded its mainland China footprint to Beijing and most recently it announced a plan to set up a base in Hong Kong.
King & Wood Mallesons (KWM) has had a turbulent few years. Since the merger with SJ Berwin in 2013 created a global firm made up of three separate partnerships, bosses have struggled to keep a hold on ‘big-hitter’ partners in the UK, keep finances in check and integrate 2,800 lawyers including 600 partners worldwide.
In the wake of the Brexit vote, there is a need for some clarity on the general subject of globalisation and a law firm’s strategic positioning. First, globalisation is not a decision. It is a force and, for all intents and purposes, a force of nature. It is the movement of people, ideas, products, services, […]
After last week’s historic decision by the British people to leave the EU many will want know immediately what the implications are.
Addleshaw Goddard’s recent announcement that it will be restricting the number of partners who can leave the firm each year is far from unique, but it is a manifestation of a management doctrine I find curious
The Travers Smith Art Programme is at the heart of our new corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme.
Last week the chairman of the legal referral network Interlaw, Michael Siebold, wrote in his opinion piece ‘Pale imitation of a network’ that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I’m more than happy to take the compliment that large firms are paying to legal networks such as ours
Imagine you are a general counsel or director in whose department sits the person who buys your company’s insurance policies. You may be about to become a star witness in insurance disputes. Is that news to you? Are you concerned by it?
Imagine you have a corporate client with a fraud or corruption issue. The client conducts its business responsibly. It has a code of ethics its leadership believes in. It wants to put its house in order and manage the associated risk. What do you advise? You won’t be surprised to read what my recommendation would […]
Santander’s Gloria Sánchez Soriano is the legal tech trailblazer tasked with implementing a transformation strategy at one of Europe’s largest banks
Jon Jansen-Alder likes boxing analogies. A veteran of more than 20 bouts, he still steps into the ring to slug it out with heavyweight rivals – but has he got a big fight on his hands as group general counsel of Simplyhealth?
Food and facilities giant Sodexo is on the brink of a major regional reorganisation, and GC Ingo Koehler-Bartels is the lynchpin
OVH’s legal chief is scathing of the US’s new data privacy laws, adding that his European internet provider company is a worthy challenger to the likes of Google.
How do you get creatives to engage with the rule of law? Appeal to their sense of curiosity, says design consultancy IDEO’s Rebecca Wint.
Legal tech company Mattereum’s GC helps start-ups with his cryptography skills and draws on his Bar background for disputes matters.
When the FT broke the story about the Presidents Club charity event, its lawyers were there to advise from the start.
E-signatures company DocuSign is growing fast, as is the remit of genial GC Reggie Davis.
At the start of 2016 restructuring partner Ashley Katz became the latest big-hitter to move over to Fried Frank Shriver Harris & Jacobson’s growing London base.
Shami Chakrabarti says she was surprised that the 13 January announcement of her imminent departure from civil rights charity Liberty attracted so much attention. Sandwiched between the deaths of celebrities David Bowie and Alan Rickman, the news still made the front page of several national newspapers, notably left-leaning The Guardian and The Independent
Since appearing in The Lawyer Hot 100 two years ago Reed Smith’s Tamara Box has taken on a new role at the US firm
John McDonnell QC was named in the Hot 100 in 2005 for his diverse practice, celebrity client roster and the launch of his new chambers, Thirteen Old Square.
Now in her 16th year at Travers Smith, Helen Croke has been key to the success of the firm’s private equity group. One of eight partners in the firm’s dedicated private equity and M&A team, Croke qualified at Travers in 2001 and moved up into partnership seven years later. The team has remained largely unchanged […]
Cathy Pitt is building CMS’ strength in the ever-changing world of funds
Jonathan Berger has found the ideal place to pursue his media work
Dan Oates is helping to build Fried Frank’s London private equity team
Mona Arshi is a prize-winning poet and former human rights lawyer. She recently won the Forward prize for best first collection. You began your training contract at JR Jones in the same week that Doreen and Neville Lawrence instructed the firm on the murder of their son Stephen. How did that time influence the rest […]
Hays general counsel for UK and Ireland Evelyn Styles tells The Lawyer why she chose a role in-house over private practice. Did you start your career in-house? I trained at a small high street practice and it gave me first hand experience of dealing with all aspects of legal maters, such as contract and commercial […]
Travis Perkins general counsel Deborah Grimason grew up around business – though she’d be the first to admit that her father’s bakery delivery business in rural Northern Ireland was a far cry from the FTSE 100 company she now guides through legal minefields. Grimason knew two things growing up: that she wanted to enter a profession […]
Natalie Sherborn left the criminal bar and is now a senior associate at defamation and reputation management firm Schillings. She tells us about how and why she made the move. What’s your background? I went to a state comprehensive school in Essex. I don’t know if anyone in our family even knew what a barrister was, […]
Maclay Murray & Spens partner Jill Reid entered private practice after 25 years in-house with Chevron UK, Shell and Dana Petroleum. Why did you make the move into private practice? I feel that my role [at Dana] as General Counsel and Company Secretary in an oil and gas operating company having assets in multiple jurisdictions with […]
Travers Smith’s David Patient gives his advice for those moving into a management role. Was moving into a management position always a career objective for you? It has certainly not always been a career objective for me, but something that evolved over time. I had the good fortune to have the opportunity to open our […]
