Cast your mind back five years ago to what seems like a different era. Clyde & Co was generating not much more than half its current revenues and Holman Fenwick Willan barely scraped into the top 40 while Ince & Co just about made the top 50. Kennedys was nowhere to be seen. Corporate markets were booming, and transaction-driven law firms were really just getting into the swing of the credit boom.
Little wonder that insurance-driven law firms were overlooked as the script for global law was written – the sector was associated with nothing more glamourous than brutally executed panel reviews and misconceived cross-selling (Barlow Lyde & Gilbert’s lost years and Davies Arnold Cooper’s ‘pillars of strength’ spring to mind).
