There used to be a running joke at the weekly meetings of Denton Hall's top-rated energy team about who had not received a call that week from US headhunters.
The danger for Dentons now is that the joke may be wearing thin.
After all, there must be a stage at which one or more rain-making partners in Dentons' star energy, telecoms, media, project finance and infrastructure teams may tire of being in a market-leading team in a firm that is itself not in the top tier.
This threat is particularly acute at a time when those headhunters are offering, it would seem, ever greater financial rewards.
The attractions of Dentons' stars is not limited to US firms. Clifford Chance, Legal Week understands, made an approach just over a year ago to hire members of the energy practice.
The reasoning behind ex-managing partner Jonathan Tatten leading the firm into two ambitious, but ultimately unsuccessful, tripartite merger talks was partially to combat this problem.
This month, Denton Hall's partnership will have the opportunity to re-appraise that strategy when it elects his replacement – or replacements, if the firm decides to split the role between domestic and international managing partners.
Tatten's long-term aim was to make the firm into a top 10 global firm – the kind of firm that can comfortably hold on to the majority of its rain-making partners.
The first set of talks, with Cameron Markby Hewitt and McKenna & Co, collapsed in 1996 when Dentons' board was reputedly divided over the merits of the deal and decided to withdraw.
The second, with Theodore Goddard and Richards Butler, failed in autumn 1998, principally because of the threat that Dentons' Hong Kong office would be decimated with no guarantee that the merger would go through, given the significant outstanding sticking points in the negotiations.
Those outside the firm will remember Tatten for his involvement in the two sets of talks.
But inside the firm the view is different. Groomed to take over the role from his predecessor, Geoffrey Searle, and having been sent by the firm on a six month management course at Harvard, Tatten is credited with steering the firm through difficult times in the mid-1990s, changing the profile of the firm and providing a clear strategy.
When he took over as managing partner at the end of 1992, Dentons was still hurting badly from the recession. The firm had been heavily over-partnered, particularly in the property practice, and Tatten carried on a re-engineering process Searle had started.
A number of senior lawyers were made redundant and some partners were told they would not be seeing out what they thought would be their natural life at the firm.
"Jonathan had to take, almost immediately, some extremely tough, fairly confrontational decisions," says one insider. "He did a tough job pretty well."
Tatten is also given credit for giving Dentons a clear strategy, stemming from a review conducted in 1994. The firm decided to focus the practice on certain key industry sectors – energy, infrastructure, telecoms and media – and to globalise the practice.
"Articulating that strategy in the way he did was terribly important," says Dentons' youthful senior partner, James Dallas.
The strategy has significantly changed the profile of the firm. In 1990, roughly 38% of the firm's business came from corporate and commercial work and 36% from commercial property. The mix now is 52% and 18% respectively.
On the back of the corporate boom of the late 1990s, profits have increased. Last year, partners at the firm made a respectable, if unspectacular, £230,000 in profits.
Another problem facing Tatten when he took over was that the firm's overseas offices were, Legal Week understands, haemorrhaging cash.
Six years on, while they are not raking in money and are not returning significant profits to the centre, they are less of a burden on the London practice than before.
In tandem with John Griffiths-Jones, advisor to Dentons' board, Tatten also built up the Denton International network – formed as a loose alliance the year before he took office.
Greater efforts have been made to integrate the network, and its eighth member, 47-lawyer Swedish firm Wistrand, was welcomed last week.
Further efforts will be made to integrate Denton International, Dallas says. "The key is to find ways of ever increasing the level of activity between the firms."
This will include increasing the amount of "financial glue", Dallas adds. "But this does not go as far as profit sharing."
As an example of Dentons' international success, he points to the work picked up advising Electricite de France (EdF) on its £1.9bn bid for London Electricity – its second-biggest corporate deal of the 1990s. EdF was a client of the French Denton International member, Sales Vincent & Associes.
But Tatten's ambitions were not limited to improving the performance of the overseas offices or a strengthened Denton International.
He reached the opinion that the supply of legal services would eventually mirror the wave of globalisation in many industries, and became one of the strongest advocates, amongst law firm managing partners, of the need for law firms to globalise their practices.
Dentons, he argued, needed to become part of one of the 10-15 firms that would be the dominant global players. And he came to the view that the firm could not reach that goal by organic growth alone.
It just did not have the strength in London – and the overall resources that would bring – to drive the overseas offices forward.
Dentons needed, and still needs, a stronger core to resource the international network, both in financial and staffing terms.
The two highly public tripartite merger talks were attempts to address this fundamental problem.
Although the firm's banking and corporate departments have expanded organically in the late 1990s and changed the firm's profile, they have not done so enough to re-invent the firm.
This is borne out by the position of the corporate department, which has only been in the top 20 of UK firms by deal value twice over the last six years. (See table.)
As one insider says: "The firm has got some very good clients and some very good lawyers, but it does not have enough good clients and enough good lawyers."
Dallas confirms that a merger with the right candidate is still on the agenda. "There is no doubt that strategic mergers would give us a better platform to move forward," he says.
As reported in Legal Week (11 February), Tatten has decided to step down as managing partner.
When he leaves for the Himalayas in April to recharge his batteries, his colleagues at the firm will already have decided what to do next.
That is when the partnership will elect a new managing partner, – and decide whether or not two people should in fact step into the role taking responsibility for domestic and international affairs respectively.
The logic behind the idea of splitting the managing partner's role is that the overseas empire has become so extensive that a separate managing partner is needed to manage it. But the firm is not waiting until the new management structure is adopted before it acts.
Its management team is already addressing how to get the most out of its enormous collection of overseas offices. (See table.)
The decision has already been taken to axe the firm's small, three fee-earning New York office, just over a year after the specialist insurance and re-insurance practice was picked up from Dibb Lupton Alsop.
New York was sacrificed to allocate resources elsewhere, especially in the Middle East. Its closure does not represent a failure of the firm's US strategy, which in the medium term is to find a transatlantic merger partner.
Ironically, almost a decade ago the firm was involved in talks with US firm Rogers & Wells – now engaged in on-off talks with Clifford Chance.
If finding a transatlantic partner is a medium-term project, bedding down the firm's acquisition (for a rumoured £1m) of various offices from Fox & Gibbons in October last year is a more immediate concern.
With the opening this week of a new office in Dubai, the firm now has 10 overseas offices.
This will increase to 12 when the firm obtains licences to practice in Abu Dhabi and Muscat.
Another challenge facing the new international managing partner, if the post is created, is the firm's Hong Kong office. The largest office in the network, with over 10 partners, it is said to still be suffering the fall-out from the talks with Richards Butler and Theodore Goddard.
Profitability is understood to have been hit by the Asian financial crisis and the office recently lost one of its star lawyers, telecoms partner Michael Gertler, to US firm Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison in Hong Kong.
Legal Week understands that delicate negotiations are now taking place with the Hong Kong partners over the office's relationship with London.
For Dallas, the international network is of central importance to Dentons. "They are not merely flags on maps," he says. "The investment we have made would take firms years to achieve."
Dallas goes on to question the long-term strategy of firms that are highly profitable now but have not invested overseas.
Dallas refuses to reveal whether there will be further expansion. But it is understood that Central Asia is high on the agenda, with Baku in Azerbaijan and Almaty in Kazakhstan possible locations because of their importance to the oil and gas industry.
In contrast to the Hong Kong office, morale in London is said to be good. Staff there are understood to have shrugged their shoulders after the collapse of the Richards Butler and Theodore Goddard talks, as if inured by the previous failure of the Cameron McKenna discussions.
And the office has also been involved in notable deals, including the London Electricity/ EdF deal and most recently the Shell/Exxon joint venture of their petroleum additives businesses.
But the threat remains that the firm may be vulnerable to aggressive poaching raids by other firms – although there are grounds for optimism that these can be repulsed.
Turnover of partners has been relatively low recently compared to some rivals.
And either by fate or by design a new partnership agreement at the firm – which meant that a merger no longer needed unanimous agreement amongst the partners – increased the notice provisions for exiting partners to 12 months.
The new deed, agreed at the height of the talks with Richards Butler and Theodore Goddard, also allowed the firm to put partners on gardening leave for the first time.
It also changed the lockstep to include a greater discretionary element, so allowing the firm to accommodate its top billers.
They include the firm's top-rated energy oil and gas and projects teams, who will be high on any potential poacher's shopping list.
The quality of the practice – clients include Royal Dutch Shell, Premier and Entergy – will be massively attractive to other firms.
In Dentons' favour, the London-based partners in that team -including Dallas, Malcolm Groom, Myles Cave-Browne-Cave and Charles Wood – are said to be fiercely loyal.
Now that Tatten has stepped down, however, the question remains whether the firm will now water down his international strategy or whether it will decide to re-trench.
Continuity will be provided by Dallas, who is mid-way through his term of office. He is also chairman of the Denton Hall international committee.
Banking partner, Virginia Glastonbury, has emerged as the front runner to become Tatten's successor, or if the partners do decide to split the role, London managing partner. She has already been promoted to deputy managing partner.
Glastonbury is said to have greater 'people skills' than the more ascetic Tatten. "If Jonathan had a fault, it was," says one insider, "that he would sit in his bunker and the strategy would come out in memos."
According to Dallas, Tatten's legacy remains in good hands.
Observers of the UK legal scene will certainly be watching closely for any signs of change.
But one suspects the firm has invested too much time and resources on its international strategy to turn its back on it now.