Where now for Allen and Goetz?

Maurice Allen just can't stop hitting the headlines. After joining Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer last year following stints at White & Case, Weil Gotshal & Manges and Clifford Chance, he had resigned himself to being a largish cog in the City giant's recently restructured banking machine.

True, some thought Allen would chafe within the institutional confines of Freshfields – but that hardly looked a deal-breaker. Freshfields is as light on process and paperwork as you will get at a top-flight global firm. And while Allen's flamboyant personality may be hard to incorporate, Freshfields has previously proved more than willing to cut slack to big characters who deliver the goods.

But then delivering the goods was soon to prove a lot harder than it looked when Allen and fellow White & Case colleague Mike Goetz rolled up at Fleet Street in March last year. Allen's reputation wasn't built on nitty-gritty practice management or technical polish – the guy likes to build business and manage the key accounts. And with Freshfields having split its finance practice into structured and asset finance on one side and banking and restructuring on the other, boosting its offering in acquisition finance with Allen and Goetz was an understandable ploy.

But once Lehman Brothers collapsed the rationale was less compelling. An already lean deal finance market went into shutdown. What work there is revolves around restructuring deals done at the height of the boom – which doesn't really play to the strengths of a business-winner like Allen.

So this week's announcement was hardly a surprise – for months Freshfields partners had been averting their gaze and changing the subject when asked about Allen and Goetz. Now the firm has the embarrassment of its most senior City hire proving an unmitigated flop. In practice terms that will have next to no impact and, with Freshfields on sparkling financial form and strategically sound ground, the Allen and Goetz affair will be nothing more than a minor footnote in the Freshfields story.

But what now for the departing duo? Surely there will be no further moves to a major firm – there is a limit to how often you can play that same card. That suggests a role in industry or something more leftfield. It's easy to see why people have been quick to predict a move to the newly-launched Greenberg Traurig Maher (GTM). But, coming after an unsettled 16 month stint in the middle of the worst finance market in living memory, that would be a far bigger practice challenge than the one Paul Maher and his book of portable business has given itself at GTM. Maybe it's time Allen did something really unexpected.

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