Alex Novarese

February 09, 2012 | International Edition

"It's an increasingly glaring contradiction that as the profession has often touted its commercial outlook, on one key yardstick its business cred has utterly failed: the dearth of opportunities for partners after they retire from law..."

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

February 07, 2012 | International Edition

It's funny that when comments are made about the legal industry there is often a strange, persistent notion that if only clients and advisers could get together, have a good chat and show a bit of consideration, then everything that ails the profession would be OK...

By Alex Novarese

5 minute read

January 26, 2012 | International Edition

I have a confession: the whole Legal Services Act (LSA)/Tesco law thing bores me terribly. Legal Week was so quick off the mark to cover the saga that my interest was exhausted by the point the profession started taking it seriously. The jargon, the acronyms, the thicket of regulation, the personal injury – it's too much even for an industry anorak to sustain attention. And yet the success of the LSA's authors in cloaking historic reform of the UK's £25bn legal market in torturous language should not obscure how fundamentally the profession is being – and already has been – shaken up.

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

January 20, 2012 | International Edition

You can forget all the forensic stuff about strategic tie-ups; large UK mergers usually don't make it over the line because the partners haven't wanted them enough and didn't sufficiently fear the consequences of not doing a deal...

By Alex Novarese

6 minute read

January 19, 2012 | International Edition

"Linklaters has been through five overhauls in a decade – four of them in the last five years. This level of upheaval contradicts the received wisdom about how aggressively you can manage a major law firm before things start falling off the wagon..."

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

January 12, 2012 | International Edition

As Legal Week went to press on the final issue of last year, the end of 2011 was starting to look a lot like the closing days of 2008. A global economy slowing, chaos in financial markets and a huge overhang of debt in all directions – well, you hardly need me to draw a picture...

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

December 15, 2011 | International Edition

I must confess that when Friederike, the Legal Week reporter who covers Linklaters, told me a few weeks back that she was working on a story about the firm launching another partnership restructuring, my pundit powers had utterly failed me - I hadn't seen that one coming at all. This means the magic circle law firm is going through its second major restructuring in three years, after the ambiguously-named New World programme saw more than 30 partners managed out in 2009.

By Alex Novarese

4 minute read

December 07, 2011 | International Edition

"Most of the firms began to expand strongly, both domestically and overseas. Chastened by the recession, Herbert Smith preferred to watch and wait, its efforts to set a strategic course being best described as desultory..."

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

November 30, 2011 | International Edition

It's hard to see why law firms cannot offer flexibility to older partners to reduce their remuneration in later years to account for the commitments you can make when you still have a lot to offer beyond brute stamina...

By Alex Novarese

3 minute read

November 25, 2011 | International Edition

This blog isn't really my opinion on Herbert Smith - I'm keeping my powder dry for a little longer on that one - but this week's effective break-up of the City firm's merger hopes and European alliance does illustrate a factor that has been hugely on display throughout this year. Amid a hectic 10 months in which we have seen a stream of international tie-ups across the globe, many of the far-reaching decisions taken by law firms have been substantively shaped by a single consideration: who gets to be the boss afterwards.

By Alex Novarese

5 minute read