Editors' Blog
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January 2007 Archives
Reading the runes for 2007
3/01/2007
By the looks of the latest legalweek.com web poll (click here) it would seem that there are a fair proportion of lawyers who are breathing a large sigh of relief now memories of those traditional alcohol-fuelled family rows are fading....Softly, softly Sullivan raises old questions for Slaughters with Emmerson hire
4/01/2007
Nobody can accuse Sullivan & Cromwell of rushing headlong into the UK corporate market. Indeed, the phrase ‘softly, softly’ could have been invented to describe the way the firm has gone about building a UK-law presence in London. It has...Everyone's a winner...or not
10/01/2007
So who is the winner? Kirkland & Ellis for hiring a respected three-partner funds team from SJ Berwin - or SJs’ transactional team for seeing the back of those grumpy folk on the other side of the office?Kirkland will be...Could mellowed Angel be rival's missing Link?
15/01/2007
Tony Angel has his critics - particularly with regard to his management style - but there is no getting away from the success his particular brand of management has brought to Linklaters during his nine-year tenure.The key point about Tony is...'We will fight them in the high streets...'
17/01/2007
There wasn’t a seat left in the house for the Special General Meeting on legal aid at the Law Society this morning. Around 400 angry solicitors descended on Chancery Lane to rail against the Government’s criminal legal aid reform proposals...Dewey can learn from predatory Leboeuf
18/01/2007
LeBoeuf Lamb Greene & McRae’s London office is getting something of a predatory reputation for its London hiring - something the firm's appointment of a two-partner capital markets team from Dewey Ballantine this week (see story) has done little to...Homeland securities worrying US investors
24/01/2007
So it seems that the US firms cannot have their cake and eat it after all.UK lawyers have long cast an envious eye across the pond to New York, where the litigation departments of the top firms are typically double...Magic circle reticence on capping is a real liability
24/01/2007
For once it seems that the magic circle is trailing the rest of the UK top 50. London's five elite firms are refusing to take the initiative on the issue of capping their liability on individual deals, despite a rise...Clients maketh the merger
26/01/2007
While queuing up at the cloakroom in the Royal Courts of Justice for the Reed Smith Richards Butler party last night I got talking to a client of the firm who asked me whether I thought the merger effectively amounted...Less fudge leaves Freshfields finance team with smaller seat at the table
26/01/2007
To think it was only a few years ago that Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer was doing all it could to promote its low-profile finance offering in the City.Million-pound McKinsey reviews, a ‘top 10 banks’ hit-list and a PR push on any...Public interest or private club?
30/01/2007
As we awaited the results of the Law Society’s absurdly long investigations into whether Allen & Overy (A&O) and Freshfields Bruckhaus Derigner had breached the conflict of interest rules, I became aware of a potentially ludicrous situation.If the Law Society had...