Ringing round backpacking hostels tring to get corporate associates back to work is no mean feat…
The fall of Lehman has been quite a boon to Weil Gotshal’s business.
Herbies offered £10k to future trainees to stay away for 6 months earlier this week…
U.S. legal powerhouse, Jones Day, has done some number crunching…
Actually the irony should not be lost on anyone anywhere that had any vested interest in the market when the sub-prime brakes went on…
For one of their partners at least…
It has emerged that US firm Mayer Brown is axeing a number of lawyers in the City.
US firm gets hero lawyer status after saving Christmas…
Christmas celebrations for insolvency specialists.
Recent estimates have suggested that fees could reach a record $1.4 billion (£860m) for lawyers, accountants and other professionals working on the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. bankruptcy.
It’s not just the bankers getting hit by a nasty Christmas surprise. Accountants and law firms are fielding criticism as details emerge of the fees they’ve generated from collapsing businesses. And Hedge funds are also getting it in the neck. They’ve received much abuse through the financial crisis – even collapsing banks got in on the act complaining about hedge fund’s shorting their stock: “When I find a short-seller, I want to tear his heart out and eat it before …
There has been a lot of flirting amongst the top 100 law firms this year. Even if hasn’t led to much action.
The City has had a feast of fees following the banking crisis.
Slaughter and May is expected to receive a total of £32.9m for legal advice between September 2007 to next March, dwarfing any other law firm on this front. Elsewhere, £32.6m was shared between PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG and BDO Stoy Harward. And Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Citi, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were on the payrole for financial advice.
In total the Treasury has paid …
Our Redundancy Watch posts were a regular feature (almost daily at some stages) for a while as firms reacted to the financial crisis. Thankfully mass redundancies have fallen out of the headlines in recent months but there is still the odd bit of bad news – Clifford Chance let eight capital markets lawyers go earlier this month and Denton Wilde Sapte initiated a redundancy programme for secretaries and support staff in October – but hopefully the worst is past.
We …
And it doesn’t make for particularly cheerful reading.
Although the top 10 UK law firms have maintained superior performance over the rest of the sector, the overall average decline in profits for the top 100 firms was 30%. And despite some of the positive signals we are hearing, business confidence apparently remains weak among law firms with none of the top 10 ‘very confident’ about prospects for revenue growth over the next 12 months. So what else is in PwC’s …
Reflecting the mixed vibes of the economic stats…
Denton Wilde Sapte has increased revenues through the downturn by 3.5% during the first half of 2009-10. Fee income reached £87.7m for the six-month period, up from last year’s figure of £84.7m. Revenue from the firm’s international offices was up from 29% last year to 32% for the first half of this year and the firm attributed its growth to the international offices.
Simmons & Simmons meanwhile has seen turnover drop significantly from …
Ok so something tells us that it’s not quite time to jump for joy with the good news. Basically because there isn’t much. More QE signalled that we are not out of the economic woods yet, a feeling you might get from this week’s roundup of legal tales…
It has been revealed that SJ Berwin is restructuring its partnership and a number of partners are being asked to leave. Commenting on the cuts, one partner told Legal Week : "It …
Despite recent attempts by supervisory bodies to curb enthusiasm for the legal profession, UCAS reports record numbers of students starting law courses this year. A total of 18,394 students have signed up to enjoy the rigours of legal academia; that’s an increase of 1.2% on last year which also set a new record.
Both prongs of the profession have tried to manage expectations about the potential careeer opportunities available. The Law Society intends to launch a campaign targeting university and …
Showing banking contemporaries how to do a bit of restraint…
Pinsent Masons, DLA Piper and CMS Cameron McKenna are among a number of firms that have held back or reduced profit distributions this year. Meanwhile Slaughter and May is considering whether or not to pay out its annual firmwide bonus at the end of the year and Shoosmiths have convinced 90% of staff earning over £25,000 to agree to take a 2.5 per cent pay cut.
Pinsents and DLA have both …
Many small firms had problems this year with rocketing insurance premiums. Thousands of Britain’s high street solicitors faced crippling increases to the cost of their professional indemnity insurance because of the threat of negligence cases arising from the recession. Adding to the controversey, it has emerged that complaints have been made by firms with African and Asian sounding names that insurers discriminated against them in the run up to this year’s PII renewal deadline. The Gazette reports that:
The Law …
The Lehman fallout is keeping wheels of professional services very well oiled through the downturn. Administrators, PwC have been raking in the fees like nobody’s business. In fact they are nearing an all time record with £154m billed for the first year. On the back of that, legal advisers, Linklaters have generated £68.9m in fees. Meanwhile, in the US legal fees for work relating to the collapse of Lehman Brothers are nearly $200m, according to Securities and Exchange Commission …
