We meet the legal professionals who have taken a leap into the future of finance, travelling from private practice into a world where there are fortunes to be made but also regulatory mountains to be climbed
On Tuesday last week (9 April), the SRA sought to quell a rising tide of discontent around the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE). In its most recent SQE annual report, SRA chief executive Paul Philip said the public and profession could have “confidence” in this “rigorous assessment”. That confidence was short-lived. Yesterday (15 April), Philip was […]
For one firm, the pan-Nordic dream is dead. For another, it’s just begun. Hannes Snellman’s announcement that its Stockholm and Helsinki offices will be going their separate ways later this year represented the end of a strategic gamble that started 16 years ago. Back then, its leadership bet that opening in Stockholm (2008) and Copenhagen […]
It seems that one of the chief attributes of managing partners is wild optimism. You can’t move for law firm leaders committing their firms to hardcore five-year targets – particularly in the upper mid-tier, where we’re hearing of plans to double or even triple revenues by the end of the decade. We’d like some of […]
What do Southend-on-Sea and Slough have in common? The answer is that they are the largest urban settlements in Britain without a UK200 law firm. The denizens of these benighted places have to make do without so much as a solitary capital markets lawyer to keep the wheels of commerce turning. Can you imagine? Perhaps […]
It’s new partner season for UK firms, when hundreds of happy associates are granted new status, obligations and bragging rights. Most firms lag behind Kirkland & Ellis, though, which made up 26 in London this year alone. Like the Roman Empire, Kirkland has always made generous grants of citizenship to expand its borders; the more […]
Barclays lost 44 lawyers in its legal team over 2023, almost four times the average number of leavers across the UK’s top banks. The banks with the second highest number of leavers is tied between HSBC and NatWest, with 12 lawyer exits each, according to indicative data. On the other end of the scale, Royal […]
CMS’s promotion numbers have ebbed slightly in its latest round seeing 10 elevated to the partnership in the UK and a total of 54 globally. In 2023, CMS promoted 65 lawyers to partner globally, with 16 of these in the UK, compared with 40 in mainland Europe. For this year the UK cohort is made […]
Another partner from Milbank’s financial restructuring team is set to leave the firm, this time joining Allen & Overy ahead of its merger with Shearman & Sterling. Karen McMaster is the latest partner loss from Milbank following last month’s news of a structured finance team led by partner John Goldfinch moving to Allen & Overy, soon […]
Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) has promoted 27 lawyers to partnership, with eight making the grade in London. This year’s cohort is smaller than last year, when 32 promotions were announced, but it brings the figure back in line with pre-pandemic rounds. Over half of this year’s cohort has been promoted in the UK and Australia, […]
Nearly 200 law students were incorrectly told they had failed their first set of Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE) exams, in what the chief executive of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has called “the most serious operational mistake that we’ve made in the last two and half years.” Kaplan, the exam administrator for the SQE, has […]
