And, even leaving aside the considerable challenge, it was by no means an essential move for the firm. With a top-tier litigation team and highly credible M&A and property practices, Herbert Smith had no burning need to build a self-standing banking team. There are plenty of corporate-driven firms in the City that have had no problem maintaining an upward trajectory with only cursory banking capability. But it was obvious that Herbert Smith had never been able to reconcile itself with that reality, an insecurity which used to manifest itself in the firm habitually talking up its meagre banking credentials.

But put all that baggage to one side and, as can be seen from Legal Week’s recent analysis of the firm’s progress, the finance drive could have gone a lot worse.

Investment has been sustained, 83% revenue growth at in three years is more than respectable, and profitability - which once substantially lagged the firm-wide average - has been considerably improved. Hiring, with the recruitment of partners like Denton Wilde Sapte’s leverage finance duo Chris Fanner and Ian Yeo and Norton Rose projects specialist Andrew Newbery, has looked well judged and has come at just the right pace to keep the team growing without compromising on quality.

The culture of the team looks right as well. As finance head Jason Fox observes, given the scale of the challenge there was no point shipping in technical wizards with little thirst to build business. The general feeling is that Herbert Smith has built a team with an energetic and entrepreneurial feel, but not to the extent that it chafes against the culture of the rest of the firm.

Obviously, it’s still early days and this project is far from complete. The 20% of firm-wide revenue target for finance is a good five years from being met. Based on the firm’s current overall growth, it’s unlikely it will ever be met, but there’s no pressing demand to build a £100m-plus finance practice to have a profitable practice that takes the firm where it needs to go. And though Herbert Smith has done a good job of getting on the right panels, it still needs to substantially upgrade the quality of mandates coming through the door.

Nonetheless, the firm has made a very credible start and, with the impact of the credit crunch not about to abate anytime soon, now is the perfect time to recruit senior talent for a firm ready to take a long-term view. The opportunity is Herbert Smith’s to take… or throw away.

alex.novarese@legalweek.com

That update comes in the form of BSB proposals, issued on Friday (18 July), which revolve around refashioning the Bar Vocational Course (BVC) into the Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC) and centrally raising standards.

This is not immediately compelling, partly because it is not apparent what needs changing from the original BVC content, let alone why there is a need for a new, even more unwieldy, name. Unlike the debate about solicitors’ training, the key issue with qualification to the Bar in recent years has focused on access and fairness rather than a consideration of whether barrister training is fit for the modern age.

In comparison, the proposal to cut BVC numbers to account for the difficulty of gaining pupillage via the imposition of a new aptitude test at least has more obvious merits.

But while it is hard to see how these recommendations can go a long way to solving the intractable problems of access at the Bar – loads of people want to do it but the advocacy profession can only support very limited numbers – what is striking is how much distrust of BVC providers underpins this debate.

Many of the strongest criticisms regarding access are reserved for providers that, many argue, charge high fees to some students who have no chance of gaining pupillage.

This is underlined by the comments of Derek Wood QC, who chaired the BSB working party, that “there are students who simply would not meet the standards required to obtain pupillage, however many pupillages were on offer”. For this he cites a “lack of conceptual understanding of the way in which law functions, [an] inability to speak fluently and an inability to write well-structured English prose”.

If Woods’ comments are representative, it seems that the real underlying problem is one of informing aspiring barristers of the brutal realities they face and the credibility of BVC providers in general.

As Lord Neuberger hinted at last year in a report on access for the Bar Council, perhaps what we are moving towards is a version of a cigarette-packet warning with which providers have to give strident declarations of the risks of smoking - sorry, Bar training.

While not much of an endorsement of education providers, this would seem to be a more logical response to the problem. After all, somehow centrally imposing higher standards on Bar training is in direct conflict with the market-based system that supplies legal education in the UK.

Imposing higher standards also limits places by other means, but there are many desirable careers in which many attempt and fail to enter without educational quotas being imposed. Instead, forcing ever more graphic disclosure of the risks to your career of BVC training would at least mean that those that choose to take the risks do so from a position of informed consent. Ultimately, tt should also mean that BVC providers would be encouraged to take more heed of the damage the BVC debate is doing to their collective brand.

alex.novarese@legalweek.com

New aptitude test proposed in rebranded BVC

A key change is the repositioning of the all-important navigation bar to the top of the site. This has given the site more room to breathe and allowed for a clearly demarcated advertising section, which includes a new job search box that acts as a window into the jobs section.

We have also taken steps to simplify the way people navigate around the site. It is now divided into nine primary sections, each with its own menu of sub-sections, which include several new items such as Law Firm Surveys and Rankings, Dealmaker and Training Contract Q&A. Keep a special look out too for developments in our new Video section. Last month legalweek.com hosted an interview between David Morley, senior partner of Allen & Overy, and Jeremy Hand, the chairman of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, on the Legal Services Act. It generated a huge amount of interest. Over the coming months legalweek.com will be building on the success of this venture to produce a range of web seminars and videos.

As for the homepage, it has been significantly expanded to incorporate many of legalweek.com’s community features. These include the ever-popular Career Clinic, Talkback, and both our blogs - Editors’ Comment and Legal Village. There are also news feeds from two of legalweek.com’s sister sites: law.com and americanlawyer.com.

We’ve had tremendous feedback about legalweek.com since we relaunched it in January 2007. This is backed up both by the degree of participation on the site and a steady and steep increase in the amount of traffic it receives. These latest changes are designed to give the site even more momentum.

Let us know what you think of the changes by emailing us at community@legalweek.com.

For those with short memories, Sonnenschein ‘enjoyed’ possibly its only moment of substantial influence on the global legal market in 2000 when it closed its 11-lawyer City arm. Almost as dramatic, the very public spectacle of internal wrangling between Weil Gotshal’s London arm and New York HQ, had a similar impact around the same time.

The response of many City lawyers was that this was proof of the flaky nature of the UK ambitions of America’s top law firms despite five years of substantive investment by a host of major US firms. On one level this was a truism with some truth; compared to the bet-the-business commitment to cross-border expansion seen at the time by London’s leading law firms, US ambitions were timid indeed and American lawyers were grudging globalisers at best.

Yet at heart, the conclusions drawn from such early reverses were wide of the mark and ultimately misleading. Sonnenschein turned out to be a practice ill-prepared for international expansion and its fate proved indicative of very little for the wider market (ironically, the firm publicly spoke of its hopes to relaunch in London just two years after pulling the plug). The same could not be said for Weil Gotshal and the 2000 finance exodus led by Maurice Allen did underline one issue that has continued to define US firms’ efforts: the challenge for London arms of winning enough support for heavy investment in a market in which many in the US have little understanding of.

Yet the predicted retrenchment never materialised, not even in the M&A drought of 2003, a period during which American firms, if anything, upped their City commitments.

So considering the history, perhaps it is worth taking US law firms at their word when they pledge to maintain investment in the Square Mile, as they did in such a wide majority in Legal Week’s US law firms in London survey.

The survey not only found no evidence of scaling back - nearly two thirds of the 51 respondents said they were aiming to expand their practice by up to 25%. Only four firms – Mayer Brown, Reed Smith, Weil Gotshal and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett – said that headcount would likely rise by 10% over the next year.

Of course, such declarations have to be treated with caution. Since such surveys emerged a few years back, US firms have habitually overestimated their ability to grow. Largely this has been due to overestimating their ability to recruit and the distance that their brand will carry them abroad; the point when hard-bitten London lawyers spoke in hushed reverence of their New York counterparts has long gone.

It is also true that with the dollar in a prolonged slump, the US economy facing challenging times and top 20 UK law firms having improved their profitability, this breed will find it harder to make the ground than they did between 2003 and 2005.

But times have changed. Since the last slump, New York has seen its position as the world’s leading finance centre come under assault from London and the rise of new economic powers has shifted the centre of gravity of the world’s economy a little further away from the utter US dominance of the 1990s. Indeed, that now decade looks like the high water-mark for America’s overwhelming economic power. Likewise, strides made in recent years by the London law firms, poster boys for a different kind of internationalism, has had some impact.

The bottom line is that attitudes have shifted in the US profession, ushering in a more international perspective. And while surveys can be taken with a pinch of salt, the string of US law firms this year that have upped their pay bands for City lawyers – despite arguably facing the most uncertain domestic conditions since the early 1990s - speaks of this renewed commitment.

Barring some surprise revival in the global economy, it is going to be a bumpy ride when so many US firms are still struggling for critical mass. Some will see their practices challenged and it would not be that surprising if some weaker performers go the way of Sonnenschein eight years ago. But, as a breed, they’re here to stay, and they’ve had more than a decade to learn from their mistakes.

alex.novarese@legalweek.com

This, of course, echoes the message that emerged sheepishly last month from Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, though the awkward timing of the Spitfire Pilot’s restructuring-induced profit surge made that understandable.

And Linklaters chose the day after A&O’s results announcement to get its numbers out there. Perhaps that’s because the growth rates were spookily similar, with both firms growing the top line by 15%, while average partner profit growth at Linklaters of 11% was just a touch above A&O’s 9%. Growth in revenue was similar to CC’s 13%, though Freshfields’ 19.5% looks impressive for a business coming out from a major shake-up.

Now all the big four have turnover in excess of £1bn, with A&O and Freshfields crossing the line this year. Relative headline profitability is a little more spread with profits per equity partner (PEP) at A&O and CC in the £1.1m range, while the unambiguously bottom line-focused Freshfields and Linklaters now hover in the rarefied region of £1.4m.

But what strikes is how similar as businesses the big four have become, both in practice breakdown, geography and underlying growth trends – it’s like Harvard Business School got hold of a copy of Vision For The Future back in ‘97 and started cloning these beasts. So A&O, buoyed by a renewed international push in the last two years, for the first time joined its peer group in generating more of its fee income from outside the UK.

The group’s revenues are also beginning to converge, though Linklaters has possibly missed its window to overtake CC. With the firm to split from a four-office network in Central & Eastern Europe and falling foul of JPMorgan, achieving flat turnover in 2008-09 would look to be a decent result. Judging the group, Freshfields and A&O currently look to have that little bit more wind in the sails, but there’s very little in it.

There’s also little evidence that prolonged credit turmoil and a global slowdown is yet to seriously damage this group. Turnover across the big four averaged 15% in 2007-08, against 24% in the boom period of 2006-07. Likewise, PEP growth has fallen from 24% to 18% (though a back-of-the envelope calculation stripping out the one-off impact of Freshfields’ restructuring would knock that down to a figure closer to 12%).

The magic circle clearly won’t be the top-performing band among the UK top 50 this year (that honour will go to the chasing pack firms) but it is far from being the worst.

Put in the context of the upcoming Global 100 from Legal Week and The American Lawyer, three magic circle firms will this year make the top 10 on the basis of profitability including Slaughter and May. Indeed, reading the runes, the latter firm should now be in the Wachtell/Cravath ballpark.

Of course, the big four are not out of the woods yet. Continental Europe and the wider Asian market, two regions that have protected this group, are now likely to slow considerably (though Russia and the Middle East will likely not). We’re also still a good way off the institutional finance markets unblocking.

But as H1 M&A research from Mergermarket showed, underlying deal activity has not been hit as hard as some of headlines would suggest, and larger firms are proving adept at soaking up market share from smaller rivals. Those expecting that the crunch would reverse the big four’s global ascent had better be patient.

alex.novarese@legalweek.com

But it is only by going there that you begin to get a sense of what it is like. For me, that process began on Monday evening last week with the car ride from Dubai International Airport past Dubai City and on to Jumeirah Beach. You can’t even begin to count the number of cranes reaching off into the distance as futuristic buildings – including the needle-like Burj Dubai - appear to be rising up before your eyes.

Last week Legal Week's events arm made its first foray beyond Europe when it held a one-day conference for senior in-house lawyers at the Madinat Jumeirah resort complex. The impetus for the Corporate Counsel Forum Middle East was the recent establishment of the Dubai Corporate Counsel Group, which underlined the growth of Dubai’s in-house legal community. We received particular encouragement from Robert Swade, chief legal officer of Jumeirah Group, and David Brimacombe, head of legal and compliance and regulatory risk for the Middle East, Pakistan, Africa and Europe at the Standard Chartered Bank. Both Swade and Brimacombe had attended Legal Week corporate counsel events in Europe and felt their colleagues in the Middle East would benefit from a similar gathering. And they were prepared to roll up their sleeves. Brimacombe chaired the event while Swade was a keynote speaker.

While some of the themes – on, say, leadership – echoed those that arise at our European gatherings, it became evident during the conference that general counsel in the Middle East face a series of challenges that are unique to the region.

Top of this list for many delegates is the need to adapt western business practices, including those lengthy legal documents, to the environment in which they work.

As more than one delegate observed, the vast majority of businesses in Dubai are still privately-owned, while many transactions are conducted more or less on the basis of a handshake. And yet Middle East-based companies and funds are stepping up their foreign investment.

If they play their cards right, the need for someone on the inside to act as a bridge between these cultures and business practices will present senior in-house lawyers with the opportunity to get closer to the hearts of their businesses than is often the case in Europe.

john.malpas@legalweek.com

The health of Russia's rule of law is a topic of interest to both Russian independents and international firms (especially now, as oil giant BP struggles with its Russian partners for control of joint venture TNK-BP). Echoing a point made several times over the course of the conference, Afanasiev stressed the need for judicial reform in Russia, which he said was vital if major M&A deals and litigation were to be done under Russian law. "We need to promote the prestige of being a judge and ensure the inevitability, not the severity, of punishment," he said.

The guest speaker at dinner on Thursday evening was Igor Artemiev, head of the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service of Russia. He assured all those present that Russia's new antitrust laws were so complicated that companies were bound to need lawyers to guide them. Not surprisingly, he was warmly received. The only downside of Thursday evening was Russia's misfiring football team, which lost 3-0 to Spain in the European Championships semi-final. Russia's law firms hope to do better.

This blog also appears on the website of The American Lawyer, Legal Week’s US sister title.

"We need to increase our profile, be integrated with the international community, and develop overseas relationships either through a 'best friends' network or more formal associations," Rudomino said.

The presentation and the Q&A that followed focused in part on how CIS firms could copy the success of leading overseas independents like Slaughter and May and Germany's Hengeler Mueller. In the battle to recruit the best staff, moderator Dimitry Afanasiev of Egorov Puginsky advised that Russian firms emphasise to potential recruits that they can offer job security, a platform for young lawyers to share profits, and the opportunity to be part of a rapidly developing business.

Although Andrey Goltsblat, managing partner of Pepeliaev Goltsblat, joked about merging his firm with Linklaters to form Golstblat & Linklaters, the prevailing sense was that these Russian firms would resist any overtures from international firms and remain independent.

This blog also appears on the website of The American Lawyer, Legal Week’s US sister title.

Firms to have been connected with the San Francisco-based practice include Chicago’s Winston & Strawn and Proskauer Rose of New York. But recently the firm has been linked more often with Baker & McKenzie.

On paper it would seem to make sense since Bakers has for a long time been on the look-out to reinforce its US practice to complement its international network, as evidenced by its talks with the now-defunct Coudert Brothers in 2005.

Putting the two together would create a practice that would become America’s largest firm by revenue, with turnover approaching $2.5bn (£1.27bn), with Heller contributing roughly $500m (£253.1m) of that total.

Managing conflicts and integration on that scale is a tall order but it would offer Bakers the prospect of securing a commanding presence in the West Coast, especially in litigation and intellectual property. Partner profitability, at both firms slightly above $1m (£510,000) in 2007 according to The American Lawyer, is also in the same ball park.

Private responses from partners at both firms range from nervous laughter to a decent impression of a rabbit in the headlights but denials have not been forthcoming.

Bakers' official statement on the matter reads: “Like all leading law firms, we are continuously studying the market for strategic growth opportunities. At any given time, we may be in discussion with a number of individuals, practice groups or firms around the world. By firm policy, we do not comment on such discussions until they are positively concluded.”

Whatever the truth, events appear to be moving quickly.

alex.novarese@legalweek.com, jeremy.hodges@legalweek.com

Forget schadenfreude - Linklaters may not be the kind of firm to typically elicit much sympathy from rivals but JP Morgan’s strong-arm tactics have rekindled the solidarity usually well buried in City lawyers’ hearts.

After all, Linklaters had accepted the instruction from Barclays Capital months before the stricken lender collapsed as a result of its exposure to the plunging credit market and months before JP Morgan in March agreed to buy the bank for a fraction of its previous value.

Linklaters had also been open with JP Morgan’s legal team about the litigation at the time of the takeover. Initially, Linklaters had the impression that JP Morgan was taking a pragmatic stance; it is widely accepted that Linklaters’ position, while commercially awkward, was not a legal conflict. But, apparently, when the bank’s executive team became aware of the issue they took a rather less charitable view. Hence Linklaters being asked to stand down or else.

Given US bar rules and its client commitments to Barclays, that gave Linklaters little option but to regretfully tough it out and see itself, temporarily at least, frozen out by one of its top banking clients.

To drive home the point, JP Morgan general counsel Stephen Cutler is believed to have sent round a strongly-worded email making it clear that Linklaters was not to be instructed under any circumstances until further notice.

While partners are trying to remain philosophical there’s no denying they feel hard done-by. But there is also widespread support for senior partner David Cheyne’s handling of the affair, which is seen as striking the right note of pragmatism with backbone.

While it could be argued that Linklaters was a touch naïve in taking the original case – US observers used to Wall Street tribalism are far less surprised by JP Morgan’s stance than London lawyers – the bottom line is that Linklaters’ calculated risk in litigating against a bank was hijacked by the impossible-to-predict events of Bear Stearns’ fire sale.

But all the sympathy in the world will be little consolation to Linklaters as the firm comes to terms with losing a client estimated by one rival to be worth in the region of £20m annually.

While JP Morgan uses a range of law firms, Linklaters is its most regular adviser outside the US. The London finance team has built a strong relationship with the bank and though Gideon Moore has the closest ties, the work feeds the rest of the leveraged finance team, including Nick Syson, Adam Freeman and Stephen Lucas. JP Morgan’s securities division has also been a regular client to Linklaters’ international offices, where the firm has handled several big ticket capital market instructions.

It’s obviously a bitter blow for a leveraged finance team already wrestling with the pronounced slowdown in Europe’s buy-out market. Some rivals even suggest the firm may have to make redundancies, though the firm strongly refutes this.

Set against this, Linklaters can rely on a good spread of quality clients, among them Citi, Royal Bank of Scotland, Merrill Lynch and Barclays and a finance team that has proved energetic and consistently upwardly-mobile in recent years.

A further ray of sunshine for Linklaters is a feeling that the relationship with JP Morgan is too developed to be severed for a long period of time. So where previous litigation-related rows like Freshfields being blackballed by Citibank and Slaughter and May falling foul of Merrill Lynch have typically led to long spells in the wilderness, there is a general expectation that Linklaters is instead in for a short, sharp shock.

After all, it’s very disruptive for a major bank to pull the plug on a primary adviser, especially in the City where, unlike New York, heavyweight finance work is dominated by just a handful of firms.

All in, the neutral observer might wonder what JP Morgan’s fit of pique has achieved, aside from generating the aforementioned sympathy for Linklaters and delivering a massive boost to the swelling band of litigation specialists angling to secure post-crunch claims against banks.

georgina.stanley@legalweek.com

"Today, Russia can say that it has one of the leading football teams in the world to go with one of the fastest growing economies," said Irina Paliashvili from Ukrainian firm RULG-Ukrainian Legal Group.

And now it's time for the region's law firms to have their turn in the sun. That was the message of the opening remarks from Dimitry Afanasiev, name partner and chairman of host firm Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners. Afanasiev said the conference should focus on pinpointing what he described as the "recipe for the successful independent or national firm in Russia or any other former Soviet republic."

He praised the contributions of the US legal market in training CIS lawyers — Afanasiev himself practised in Philadelphia as a young attorney — but insisted that it was now time for the local firms to stand on their own two feet, "We have come of age," he asserted.

Afanasiev congratulated the organisers of the conference for building links between law firms in the former Soviet republics. "Now, more than 15 years since the collapse of the USSR, we're talking to each other again," he said. It's imperative, he went on, that the Russian legal community mirror the success of Russian companies and play its own role on the international stage.

"Why should a deal between a company from Tajikistan and one from Azerbaijan be conducted under English law?" he asked. Some 200 lawyers from the Commonwealth of Independent States (the countries of the former Soviet Union), Europe and the US are attending the forum, including attorneys from Linklaters, Spain's Uría Menendez, Germany’s Hengeler Mueller and Russia's ALRUD and Pepeliaev Goltsblat & Partners.

On the agenda for tonight: cheering for Russia in the televised Russia v Spain match in the conference hall.

Organized by RULG-Ukrainian Legal Group and hosted by Russia's Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners - the firm was the subject of a profile that featured in Legal Week last year - the forum brings together lawyers from local and international firms in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan and beyond.

Egorov Puginsky has become one of a small brood of independent Russian firms with some clout in the Russian market, a standard-bearer alongside Moscow boutiques Pepeliaev Goltsblat & Partners, Liniya Prava, and Andrey Gorodissky & Partners. As such, the firm is becoming an increasingly prominent fixture on Russia's legal scene.

On Thursday (26 June) the keynote address will be delivered by the head of Russia's Federal Anti-Monopoly Service, who should provide insight into Russia’s embryonic antitrust laws. We’ll be blogging from the event, so check back regularly in the coming days for more on the leading business lawyers in the region.

rlloyd@alm.com

This blog also appears on the website of The American Lawyer, Legal Week’s US sister title.

The debate I’m referring to concerns a recent news article and commentary in the latest Legal Week based on an annual report produced by our research arm.

The story received a number of critical posts from sceptical readers. The gist was that we were being naive, that rises in job satisfaction had more to do with the slump in work levels than proactive efforts of law firms and that the positive findings were “standard deviation”. Some said we were wrong because they hate their jobs and are miserable, with one poster feeling that “law is dull and boring and we would all leave if we could”. Some accused us of “spin”.

In addressing those points, first a little background. The report is a substantial piece of work now in its fourth year and is produced independently of Legal Week’s editorial team. It breaks down the attitudes, priorities and frustrations of associates across a range of criteria, ranking more than 50 law firms on the basis of nearly 3,200 responses. This is a research product, not a supplement. So the value in it for law firms is seeing how they rank against their peers to inform their decision-making.

Since the rankings are not published, there’s very little motive to try to talk up or manipulate their individual rankings. As such, I would argue that claims of law firm “spin” are wide of the mark, not least because no firm has seen the report yet.

The previous three editions have all produced a clear picture of low morale, cynicism and lack of engagement, especially among women. Not only was that picture established in the first report in 2005, but trends in the subsequent two editions strongly indicated that the situation was getting worse. And Legal Week prominently reported this gloomy picture each time, which seemed highly relevant to the state of the modern profession.

But the 2008 report found, at least in comparison, a different set of trends. On a range of criteria (respondents are canvassed on no less than 36), there was a clear pattern of rising satisfaction, both with hard factors such as pay and bonuses and softer issues related to quality of life. Since that flies in the face of the prevailing wisdom about life in big law firms - and since we have reported the negative stuff - it seemed news-worthy. But as a news magazine we have no stake in painting a rosy picture, since bad news typically makes good copy and attracts readers.

Now, it may well be that previous research was also wide of the mark - but that means everyone will have to throw out the widely-held views about junior lawyers being unhappy with City life, because you can’t credibly accept research when it goes one way and then reject it when it goes the other.

Several posters pointed out that the slowdown, which has given over-worked associates a respite, has been a major factor. I would absolutely agree but I think that the news article and commentary made that clear. Of course the state of the job market and levels of job security affects how people view their jobs – how could it not? – but weren’t associates arguing they wanted more money and less work? In many cases, they got their wish.

As to “standard deviation” regarding the number of people wanting to be partners as it only moved upwards by 3%, I would agree if that picture hadn’t been backed up by a host of other metrics supporting the general theme that fewer people are looking to get out of law.

Are there plenty of cynical, miserable junior lawyers still out there? No doubt, but a series of substantive pay rises, larger partnership rounds over the last two years, the spread and popularity of partner alternatives and the current slowdown suggests that there are a few less than there used to be. Rest assured, if the next annual report shows a reassertion of the gloom and resentment we’ve all become familiar with, we’ll report that too; we’re neutral at Legal Week.

But one final point; having spent a fair few years reporting on law firms, I’m as cynical as the next guy. I’ve worked on stories about corruption, theft of client money and serious sexual assault in the profession, so I’ve had the chance to see law firms in their least flattering light. Yet one thing still strikes me: for better or worse, law firm managers do care more about the welfare and morale of their junior ranks than they used to. They talk about it more, they think about it more and they worry about it more (even if they are sometimes pretty cack-handed about communicating that to the troops).

Of course, the real test of these self-heralded progressive credentials will be in a tougher commercial market, which will finally separate the firms that are really committed to investing in staff from the cut-and-run merchants. Will they be more long-term this time? That I wouldn’t like to say.

alex.novarese@legalweek.com

Actually, what the blog was intended to convey is that there is, if anything, an excess of process - it's simply that in a significant number of cases it fails to produce a common-sense result.

In many cases this is because law firms have been guilty of over-dosing on the letter of HR good practice while totally neglecting the spirit. Having 15 separate interviews that dance around the core issues not only tells you very little, it can be downright counter-productive because it becomes harder to maintain focus on the key issues. Yes, lengthy business plans get produced - but so what if there is a lack of intellectual rigour in their creation or assessment?

And, as one senior consultant recently remarked to me, does anyone know a prospective partner-hire that has actually been terminated due to a psychometric test? So in a considerable number of cases you have a lengthy process that fails to deliver on turnaround or rigour. A case of the worst of both worlds.

And still too often law firms fail to keep in mind that the partners who want to move are in a fair number of cases not the ones that are right for your business. It was the realisation of the limitations of the lateral hire market that several years ago led some shrewd law firms and consultants to develop the upward-partner market, where promising senior associates were offered partnership at a new firm.

Perhaps some of the consultants took the original piece as a personal crack at their profession, though the criticisms in the piece were aimed at the law firms themselves, not the retcons. Indeed, the challenge for consultants is that law firms too often incentivise them on movement rather than quality.

This makes it much harder for those astute consultants that would like to add value by making sure they bring in the kind of partner that will fit in with, and build the business of, a law firm client.

alex.novarese@legalweek.com

After all, if you have no clear position, you can argue that you’ve never changed it. Of course, many would see the current proposals for bolstering integration between the two sides of the business (and three LLPs) to be short of the grand rhetoric heard at the time of the 2005 union between the UK’s DLA and us duo Piper Rudnick and Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich.

The proposals currently going out to partners essentially revolve around boosting its global pool for central investment, finessing its firm-wide sector groups and improving its international secondments.

That is as best as outside observers can tell because the firm is guarded to the point of paranoia about discussing its agenda or giving concrete details. But - inevitably - the more the firm is seen to be evasive regarding the union, the more attention it attracts.

Indeed, while the legacy DLA always had a keen eye for using style to sell its undoubted substance, the feeling increasingly is that the promotion of the DLA Piper concept is starting to detract from the reality of the firm.

So the firm chooses to now present its financial results globally, though it still largely exists as two separate profit centres, partnerships and management teams. In 2008, this allowed the firm to trumpet that its turnover had risen by 18.7% to hit the globally-imposing figure of $2.1bn (£1.07bn). However, that obscures the fact that the US side of the business contributed $1.134m (£578m) of that total. Those that wishes to know more about the finances of the UK business can read this report on its latest LLP filing.

None of which changes the fact that there was a clear logic to the tie-up, which has dramatically boosted the global profile of the legacy businesses and must generally be seen to have delivered.

Having so far largely avoided the thorny issues of full financial integration – top-billers in the US still earn far more than UK equivalents despite the legacy DLA partnership’s meritocratic pay model – has allowed the pairing to dodge many of the problems that plagued Clifford Chance following its US merger. And everyone knows that mergers of equals are the hardest to pull off, especially when the equals are in foreign countries, so perhaps the firm has made an astute call. But why not be more straightforward about that compromise?

Perhaps it is because there are limits to how far you can get by on style and profile without making the hard choices. While only a fool would quickly write off DLA Piper, the question now is how much further the firm can go in its current form.

alex.novarese@legalweek.com