To hear that McDermott Will & Emery is known in the US as 'The Stealth' came as something of a surprise to Legal Week.
The firm picked up the nickname after years of spurning the US media. But on this side of the Atlantic, the firm is adopting more of a cluster bomb-type strategy.
The sortie began last November, when Simmons & Simmons lost its head of corporate finance, head of tax and a senior banking partner to the 'low-profile' US firm.
Last week, Warner Cranston became the latest firm to suffer, as its highly-regarded head of employment, David Dalgarno, succumbed to McDermotts' charms.
He will work alongside employment law doyen Fraser Younson – who joined McDermotts from Baker & McKenzie in March – in what Dalgarno says will be "one of the best employment practices in the UK".
With the Simmons trio – William Charnley, Peter Nias and Graham Rowbotham – alongside Morgan Lewis & Bockius' Robert Rakison, Herbert Smith's John Reynolds, Citibank IT specialist Philip Rees and a raft of assistants, McDermotts' London office showcase is definitely on the road.
It is the sheer scale of its ambitions to create a full-service office that makes Chicago-based McDermotts' plans different to those of other US firms' London offices.
Rivals of McDermotts have approached things from a different angle. Some, such as premier Wall Street firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, only practise New York law.
Others, such as Sullivan & Cromwell, have recruited English-qualified teams, but only in specific areas. Sullivans recently set up its first English law practice by recruiting Jamie Logie from Norton Rose.
Elsewhere, Dewey Ballantine has opted for an even balance between English and US lawyers in its London office – its latest recruit being Nabarro Nathanson corporate partner Mark Saunders. The office concentrates on specific practice areas that mirror the firm's core strengths back in the US.
Finally some, including New York-based Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft, have followed the principle of building an English firm to work with the core strengths of US-based practice groups.
In fact, most London offices of US firms are boosting their practices. Some of the most notable moves this year have been to non-New York headquartered firms, with Simmons & Simmons corporate finance partner Peter Faber moving to Jones Day Reavis & Pogue and Masons project finance duo Nigel Weiss and Steven Janes jumping ship to Mayer Brown & Platt.
But McDermotts has really stolen the show. Since it set up six months ago it has grown to 16 fee earners, and has been the topic of much industry debate.
William Charnley, managing partner of the London office, says: "What we have to be is confident in what we're doing."
That confidence appears to have captured the City's imagination. But the public perception of the firm back in the US is very different. There it is the firm's media shyness that makes it stand out from the rest of the pack.
During his last visit to London, Lawrence Gerber, McDermotts' managing partner, "reluctantly" agreed to an interview.
"We have a very mid-western culture," he says. "We are a hard-working firm. We are also a firm that is fairly laid back."
By this Gerber does not mean that lawyers bill fewer hours than at rival firms – rather he is referring to the firm's attitude to management.
"We like to keep bureaucracy to a minimum. We believe less management is good management."
He continues: "We are a firm that is very concerned about the independence of our lawyers and our lawyers put great value on their feelings of independence.
"We are not a firm where someone is looking over your shoulder all the time."
Gerber says that the firm has had an international practice at least as long as he has been around – roughly 35 years – and so it is inaccurate to say that McDermotts has only recently turned its sights abroad.
But he reveals that the decision to open in London was not made lightly and was, in fact, developed over seven years.
"I knew we would have to open an office in London in 1991," Gerber says. "But we were not ready to do that then."
The 15 or so partners on the firm's strategic planning committee finally recommended that the firm open an office in London in 1995. "What followed on," says Gerber, "was that I spent a year studying the market, making trips over here, talking to people and learning as much as I could.
"Following that we spent about a year talking to various firms about a possible merger, which we subsequently decided was not for us. We then spent about a year talking to various individual lawyers about joining us. This was not a rash act."
The driving force behind the whole process was the now familiar analysis that in five to 10 years' time there will be a small tier of elite international firms that will dominate the delivery of legal services to the most active international clients.
McDermotts, it appears, has every intention of being part of that elite.
"Once you come to that conclusion in terms of what is happening in the marketplace, it is clear that you have to have a major presence in New York and a major presence in London," Gerber says.
He adds: "After that, everyone has their own theories of where you have to be. But New York and London are absolutes."
One of the big selling points of McDermotts' London office is the plan to provide a broad range of English law services.
Many of the London offices of US firms choose, or are forced, to work on cross-border transactions in tandem with existing UK firms, as they do not have certain skills in specific areas.
For instance, last week Legal Week revealed that Shearman & Sterling had to refer its Bahrain-based client Investcorp to Dickson Minto for much of the English law advice in its joint acquisition (alongside venture capitalists Cinven) of AstraZeneca's speciality chemicals business (Legal Week, 20 May).
Despite its strength, Shearmans' London-based banking practice realised that it did not have the M&A team to pull the deal together. Now the firm has recruited Ashurst Morris Crisp's highly-rated corporate partner Adrian Knight to plug that gap and in the future will look to keep all the work in-house.
McDermotts, on the other hand, has gone all-out to recruit rainmakers in the core areas of a general practice firm – corporate, banking, employment, property, litigation, tax and intellectual property.
Gerber says the decision for full service reflects the practice of the firm as a whole. "We view our strength as providing a broad range of services in highly specialised areas."
But this involves heavy investment, reflected in the tone of McDermotts' recruitment advertisement promising the right partners more than £1m if they sign up. Obviously not everyone will get this figure and it is unclear how an employment or tax partner on a £1m income could generate the necessary fees of more than £3m.
It is also unclear how many partners on £1m could be supported by a partnership that had average profits per partner of $705,000 (£440,625) in 1998, according to The American Lawyer.
So a question mark hangs over how long the firm can afford this scale of investment.
"If the partnership believes that the investment is key to its future then it will support it," Gerber says.
"During that period of 1995 to 1998 we were not limiting ourselves to learning about the London market and interviewing people, we were also involved with educating our partners, answering questions like 'what are we doing?', 'why are we doing it?' and 'what is it going to cost?'"
He reveals: "The reason why I said we were not ready to do it in 1991 when I knew we would have to open in London is that we were not ready financially in 1991."
Gerber says he is bemused by the coverage that the legal publications have given to his firm's UK recruitment policy.
"I would be more interested at your end if we were coming here and offering less to English partners than we offer to American partners," he says.
"Our English partners are making what their counterparts in the US are making. I don't know why that is big news."
Of course, the sceptics would have to eat their words if after a year McDermotts London turned around and announced it had worked on x amount of transactions, bringing in x amount of fees and generating x amount of profits for the firm.
But even the optimistic Gerber does not expect that to happen. He sees the project needing three to five years to bear fruit.
When asked whether the London office has to break even in its first year, Gerber launches into a winding, but ultimately revealing response.
"We consider ourselves to be a very well-managed firm," he says. "But there are times where we will do something that someone will look at and say how can you consider yourselves well managed if you do this? You're getting into an area of that type.
"Do we have a set timetable for breaking even in London? The answer is no.
"Do I have a time period in which I would like it to happen? Yes. I expect to break even next year, but we might not and it's not the end of the world. It is all subject to variables.
"We told our partners that London would cost us a certain amount of money in 1999 and we told them if we were truly successful in 1999 it would cost us twice that amount because our investment would be twice as great as we anticipated."
You sense that the latter is true with the arrival of Charnley, Nias, Rowbotham and Rakison from day one and now with Younson and Dalgarno on board.
In mapping out its strategy for London, McDermotts can benefit from the collective experience of the more than 90 other US firms that have set up offices in London. The route to a successful office launch may now be more clearly mapped out than it was a couple of years ago.
Nias says one key lesson was the need to be confident that the firm would achieve its target of having a core 50 lawyers in place by the end of the year.
Other growing offices of US firms such as Jones Day and Morgan Lewis & Bockius have had to move location once or twice within the City and will have had to get around the problem of their long leases. McDermotts wanted to avoid that.
Nias says this influenced the decision to take a risk and go for the larger of several options – 21,000sq ft of office space at 7 Bishopsgate.
"No law firm wants to tie up capital in property," he says. But the firm now has the capacity for 60 lawyers and has the flexibility to take on further floors in the building over the next year or so.
Gerber says with a smile: "The most important thing we have learned is that we were right – that our perception of the market for a firm of our type was correct.
"In fact it is beyond our expectations in terms of the clients who have followed the partners who have joined us and we are very pleased in terms of work we are getting from existing and new clients."
Gerber already appears to have the office's future worked out. The short-term growth will continue to be fuelled through lateral hires, as he says that he is not looking for a merger with an existing English practice.
"We have studied merger possibilities in two separate situations – London being one of them – and our basic conclusion is that there is more risk in a merger than reward," he says.
The next big investment may be Germany. Gerber says: "We have a very large German practice base, have a German practice group in New York and consequently we are thinking about whether it makes sense to open an office in Germany."
But, predictions that the McDermotts flag will soon appear in Frankfurt are apparently premature. "We haven't reached a decision yet," Gerber says.
However, when asked if a decision on a German office will take three years of debate, as happened for McDermotts London, he responds with a smile. "Hopefully, it will not take quite so long."