Bumping up the numbers at Barclays
Barclays' new panel is good news for firms, but with its cost-cutting drive, how much work are they actually going to get?
June 22, 2005 at 08:03 PM
3 minute read
The sound of champagne corks could be heard pop-ping all around the City when Barclays announced its new legal roster earlier this month.
No less than nine new appointments were made and not many firms suffered the ignominy of losing their place.
Among the 'winners' was US outfit Shearman & Sterling, which was provided with a trophy UK client after being named for the first time on the lending and finance panel, along with Sidley Austin Brown & Wood, which was already on the securitisation panel.
Norton Rose also secured its first Barclays appointment on the same panel, while Addleshaw Goddard and Travers Smith replaced mid-tier private equity rivals Wragge & Co and SJ Berwin on the private equity panel.
The biggest winner, of course, was Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, which, following its near-miss in the last review in 2003, was appointed to five new sub-panels as well as being named on the high profile general advisory panel.
Such success places the firm alongside the likes of Allen & Overy and Clifford Chance as adviser to the bank in almost every area, a victory for Freshfields' finance department, which has spent the last year attempting to build a name for itself with big-name client wins such as this.
But, as everybody knows, getting on the panel is only half the battle, especially as Barclays is well-known for its ability to secure low fee rates with its advisers.
The last review saw the bank cut the length of its panel appointments from three to two years so that it could get firms to agree to the lowest possible rates.
It has repeated the tactic this time around. Further evidence of cost-cutting can be seen with the reemergence of the human resources panel, which was subsumed into the general advisory panel in the 2003 review.
Barclays says it has resurrected the panel in order to agree lower rates for what it regards as 'commoditised' work.
At first blush the creation of the new human resources panel smacks of generosity.
The reality is very different – especially as the general advisory panel will now be slicing up a slightly smaller cake between more people, thanks to the arrival of Freshfields at the table.
Which leads to an obvious question: with so many new appointments to the panel and so few exits from it, how much work is each panel firm actually going to get?
The bank now has about 50 firms across a total of 114 panel slots in a network of 12 panel groupings.
Bearing in mind that late last year oil giant BP slashed the number of its UK advisers from nearly 100 to around just 10, the sheer size of Barclays' adviser roster certainly appears excessive, even accounting for the fact that it is a financial institution.
Barclays itself admits that it has adopted larger panels to encourage competition for future pieces of work.
Perhaps the bank has been following the recent debate in the pages of Legal Week on the need for savvy procurers of legal services to guard against becoming over-dependent on too few suppliers.
Either way, those new entrants to the Barclays panel should keep the champagne on ice until they actually get some work.
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