We at Law.com International are as loath to using the term ‘Magic Circle’ as most of the firms that were once famously part of it. But, time and again, it draws is back.
Once a catchy descriptor of the go-to advisers to Corporate Britain, in recent years the term has become less meaningful. Over the past two decades, deals became genetically more transatlantic, and the four firms most often named to the group—Clifford Chance, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Allen & Overy and Linklaters—became more international while each day they ceded yet more U.K. market share to U.S. firms.
