Alex Novarese

January 24, 2013 | International Edition

Towards the closing months of the last millennium, a cocky young reporter walked into a chaotic office in Farringdon to join a new title called Legal Week. The exact nature of its work eluded me – other than that it involved the legal profession – but I had a couple of years' business reporting experience and a compulsive streak which got me up to speed fairly quickly with this strange new community.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

January 09, 2013 | International Edition

Bingham McCutchen has promoted two City lawyers in its annual partnership round as US litigator Geoffrey Aronow leaves the firm to become general counsel at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The US firm's 13-strong partner promotions round has seen lawyers made up in London, Frankfurt, Hartford, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tokyo and Washington DC, across a range of practices including corporate, estate planning, financial restructuring and investment management.

By Alex Novarese

2 minute read

December 13, 2012 | International Edition

As we put the full write-up of the British Legal Awards to bed for the final issue of 2012, it seems an apt moment to reflect on the achievements of the legal profession in what proved yet another challenging year. And they are considerable. Law is a startling success story for British business, contributing over £20bn to the domestic economy annually and in the region of £3bn in exports – a figure that has nearly tripled against a decade ago. And this a material underestimate, since such official figures focus on private practice and fail to capture the huge expansion of in-house legal departments over the past 20 years. Well over 250,000 are employed in the law and directly-related fields in the UK.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

November 29, 2012 | International Edition

I enjoy a laugh as much as anyone and the newspaper industry – and it is an industry – has done much to contribute to my mirth over the past two months with a series of pre-emptive strikes ahead of publication this week of recommendations from the Leveson Inquiry. Since I'm writing this the day before the report is issued on Thursday (29 November), what Leveson will recommend remains unclear, though the money has been on some form of beefed-up self-regulation with a statutory back-stop since day one.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

November 22, 2012 | International Edition

It looked significant at the time but in retrospect the 2010 tie-up between Lovells and Hogan & Hartson genuinely marked – and itself influenced – the changing shape of the legal industry. Not only because it constituted a transatlantic union between two major firms, but because the pair chose to deploy a multi-profit centre structure that has since been widely used over the last two years. Some deals haven't dazzled but none looks more significant than last week's news that Norton Rose has secured a tie-up with Fulbright & Jaworski. But then arguably it was Norton Rose that created the model for Hogan Lovells with its takeover of Deacons. Rivals scoffed but it kicked off a run of deals in Australia by firms that see themselves as well above Norton Rose's station. The underlying point? The Fulbright deal highlights the extent to which the last five years have seen industry-defining activity occurring outside the magic circle. Of course, claims that London's legal elite would wither in the face of recession were nonsense but, as a group, neither have they displayed quite the dominance we've come to expect, as we address in this week's analysis on Linklaters.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

November 15, 2012 | International Edition

Legal Week's editor in chief Alex Novarese argues that the Bar should ditch the dogma and focus on its past to reposition chambers as tightly focused providers of top-quality legal services...

By Alex Novarese

6 minute read

November 08, 2012 | International Edition

"Law firms just don't get it, they spend all their time thinking about transactions and that's so far off the agenda for general counsel right now. What GCs are focused on is risk." So said an old contact of mine who spends much of their time working with senior corporate counsel. It's hard to argue. Everywhere you turn there is risk for large companies.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

October 25, 2012 | International Edition

I understand the pressure for law firms to reduce their costs, and why this topic has exercised the profession in recent years, but for a long time I have wondered why there is so little corresponding attention paid to the other side of the equation: the ability to win work.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

October 25, 2012 | International Edition

Even for an event featuring such varied and attention-grabbing topics as the implosion of the euro, illicit videos of pop stars and the underside of press ethics, there was no doubt which issue dominated Legal Week's Corporate Governance and Risk Forum.

By Alex Novarese

6 minute read

October 18, 2012 | International Edition

Numbers, oddly, equal emotion. One of the first things you learn in business reporting is that the seemingly scientific world of figures often comes down to all-too human feelings of ambition, fear, frustration, greed and pride. Take the Global 100 – or, for that matter, all leagues of law firm performance – beauty and ugliness remain in the eye of the beholder. Law firm leaders look into that mirror of metrics and see hugely contradictory reflections that back the strategic decisions they have bet their careers on.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read