When the news broke that one of Germany's leading firms, Bruckhaus Westrick Heller Loeber, was in merger talks with Freshfields, eyebrows were raised.
But the excitement dimmed after, on 14 April, part of the German/Austrian firm voted not to merge with the magic circle firm.
The 140-partner German firm insists that the merger has only been thrown a curve ball and that it will keep the whole thing on track, but the firm admits there is no longer any kind of timetable for the marriage.
Burkhard Bastuck, Bruckhaus' most vocal partner and one of the drivers behind the UK merger, was frank about the pressures his firm is under to merge.
"The focus is not independence; the question is, 'what do firms have to offer their clients and how do they achieve that'," Bastuck says.
Traditional culture is the central issue behind the failure of the merger so far. The initial merger vote failed due to a minority, but sufficiently large, group of partners from offices that are detached from the cosmopolitan centre of Frankfurt.
These are understood to be some partners in Bruckhaus' Vienna office who were opposed to the merger, along with partners from more domestic German offices such as Hamburg.
Bastuck's thinking about the firm's role in the future might exacerbate these local sensitivities. For him the firm must be at the forefront of top international transactions.
"Can we offer cross-border transactional advice and transactions where we need to in the main financial centres – can we offer that? Do we want to go for that business?" Bastuck asks. "The answer is yes to 'can', and yes to 'want to'."
Although Bastuck says he does not want the firm to chase every major transaction, he clearly sees Bruckhaus as forming part of an integrated international firm.
"We must offer common law capabilities to our clients and it is these concerns among the partnership that may lead to a merger," Bastuck says. But following Haarmann Hemmelrath & Partner in setting up a local office in London is not an option. He says the firm would need to hire the equivalent of a small City firm just to get its common law M&A practice up and running, let alone find the right quality people.
"We have no plan to hire 100 solicitors in London," Bastuck says, although hiring more local lawyers in other jurisdictions is always a possibility. "Civil law is just not as attractive an export as common law. For example, it is easy to export common law in finance," Bastuck adds. "Language is an obvious barrier too – no-one wants to learn German. We are handicapped in that respect."
Despite many foreign offices that already include Bratislava, Brussels, Budapest, Hong Kong, New York and Shanghai, it is clearly a merger with Freshfields that is the route to further expansion.
"As a German firm, we will never play the same role as US and UK firms with regard to exporting German law; we do not want to be number one in Vietnam, we want to maintain our position here in Germany and Central Europe," he says.
That is the real issue for Bastuck: keeping ahead of the curve in Germany. He sees the current Anglo-Saxon feeding frenzy as nothing more than the logical development of the German legal market.
"We see a development from regional firms to national firms and from national to international firms involved in major transactions that do some domestic, but mostly cross-border work," he explains.
The end result of this evolution? An elite league of international legal players that will handle all the big deals. That is where Bastuck wants to be. It is a group that firms such as Freshfields would not feel uncomfortable in and a merger with a leading firm such as Bruckhaus would certainly give both firms' ambitions a major boost.
But what is the future of such a merger? It would not be the first, nor will it be the last time a merger was scuppered by a minority of conservative partners.
"There is no timeline now and we have no particular date to merge by," Bastuck says. But, he will not allow the merger talks to unravel. "It is in the air and it will not linger for an unlimited period of time," he says.
What about Herbert Smith? It is a clear rival to Freshfields in the global market and a firm that is building its relationship with the German firm through partner secondment to its corporate department in Frankfurt.
Herbert Smith has said, although it does not want to merge with Bruckhaus right now, it is serious about extending its German capability. In other words: 'Let us wait and see how the Freshfields talks pan out and then make our move'.
"There is no political significance to the secondments here. We are not intending to make a political statement and I am sure that if we have to, we will adapt relationships with other firms to a new situation," says Bastuck cryptically, leaving his options open.
When pressed on a Herbert Smith merger as an alternative, Bastuck is adamant for a moment, perhaps showing the strain of the failed merger talks: "We are thinking about a combination with Freshfields – we are definitely not thinking about what will happen five years down the road, or what will happen otherwise.
Bastuck is happy to talk about how the firm is doing – aside from its failing merger. Money is one area that Bastuck says is not an issue at his firm. "We have no reason to complain about the market. We have a good position and we are proud of it. 1999 was our most successful year, and the year before that our previous most successful year."
And although the merger talks are up in the air, Bastuck does appreciate the increased media interest in the firm. "We are perceived as one of two firms in Germany – the other is Hengeler [Mueller Weitzel Wirtz] – but on a broader view, we are probably more in the limelight," he says.