Alex Novarese

March 10, 2010 | International Edition

Law firms don't generally have strategies. This basic point often gets lost in the commentary about the legal industry. What firms in many cases actually do is what they want to and then rationalise that as strategy. To a certain extent this course will be shifted by the client and labour markets and the fashionable business ideas of the day. But the pedestrian on this path will basically head where he wants to go, at least until he runs out of road or the conditions render the path impassable.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

March 03, 2010 | International Edition

'Eversheds and Superbrands - really? I mean, really?' The email I received last week from an acquaintance on another publication summed up the mood of dismissive ire that greeted the news that Eversheds outranked the entire magic circle in the annual Superbrands poll.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

March 01, 2010 | International Edition

Well, the 2010 pay round for City assistants has largely already been set, and we didn't even make it out of February. That is because Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer - having quite rightly led the market in early 2009 by halting its assistant lockstep - last week decided to restart the track. And it will be very surprising if this policy is not widely adopted by rivals in the spring when most firms get around making a decision on assistant pay.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

February 11, 2010 | International Edition

For as long as I can remember there has been talk of when or whether SJ Berwin would try to put together a merger with a US law firm. For a firm with a thrusting US-style culture and a tempting European footprint for an international suitor, it isn't hard to see why some have viewed its end-game as a transformative cross-border merger. Some partners are well disposed to such a move, though opinions have always varied internally.

By Alex Novarese

4 minute read

February 10, 2010 | International Edition

There's been much talk in recent years about the remoteness of partnership, a factor thought to be driving young lawyers away from the law. But reading this week's in depth special on women in law, it is clear that partnership at major City firms is anything but unobtainable - providing you are a man. To a male trainee at a major City firm you're implicitly entering a competition to, in a decade or so, become a very well-remunerated owner of the business. Not a breeze, certainly, but your odds will be massively improved by the fact that 55% to 60% of the group you are competing against - meaning women - will choose to quit the race in vast numbers. The only mystery is why more men aren't flocking to the law with odds like these.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

February 08, 2010 | International Edition

February is already shaping up to be an eventful month with the news today that Allen & Overy (A&O) is making its debut in Australia with a 17-partner team coming just days after Latham & Watkins reinforced its international network with a 13-partner haul from White & Case. The primary casualty of this latest move, Clayton Utz, which is losing 13 partners to the London firm, was so understandably so eager to get the news out first that A&O was caught scrabbling to catch up with its statement.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

February 03, 2010 | International Edition

With White & Case once more hit by departures, it's starting to feel as if my job description involves writing about internal tensions at the firm every year or so. The background has been well published: for a long time there was a sense the firm's City arm had not always sat happily within its global network, despite the practice achieving explosive growth during the credit boom. Tensions had also simmered for years within a firm that could not count on the clear sense of identity that comes from fitting easily into Manhattan's clubby legal market - the firm's internationalism since the 1980s has made it an outlier on Wall Street.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

January 29, 2010 | International Edition

White & Case's City arm is looking increasingly like the unhappy child of the credit boom. While the practice could do no wrong in 2006 and 2007, achieving City revenues of around £100m after a period of explosive growth, the news revealed today by Legal Week that it is losing four finance partners leaves it looking badly off the blistering pace it managed a just few years back.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

January 27, 2010 | International Edition

Poor old Eversheds. Straight after Legal Week this month reported the firm was piloting an outsourcing venture with its South African ally, the venture was subjected to a series of caustic remarks in the media spread across five separate articles within a week. The source of the sustained criticism was Eversheds' apparently ill-fated flirtation with commoditisation and low-end work.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

January 21, 2010 | International Edition

Assessing the prospects for this year's impending launch of Hogan Lovells remains, despite the extensive coverage it has already received, no easy task. Twenty years since leading US and UK firms began thinking seriously about international expansion there remain few precedents for a merger of equals in the upper reaches of the global legal market. Transatlantic unions have proved even more elusive; some would argue that the governance structure of DLA Piper and the disparity in size between Clifford Chance and Rogers & Wells means there has never been a true merger in this class.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read