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  • December 4, 2009 |

    Stephenson Harwood, Linklaters and Abbey honoured at British Legal Awards

    Stephenson Harwood, Linklaters and Abbey National were among the winners at the 2009 British Legal Awards. Stephenson Harwood secured the coveted Law Firm of the Year award, with the judging panel - which included several senior general counsel - praising the firm for the dramatic turnaround in its fortunes.

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  • December 1, 2009 |

    Weil Gotshal makes up just three to partnership as London misses out

    Weil Gotshal & Manges has announced a depleted partner promotions round, with just three lawyers set to join the partnership on 1 January 2010. No London-based lawyers will join the firm's partnership in this year's round, with the total of three promotions representing less than half of last year's tally, when seven were made up worldwide, including one in the City.

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  • November 26, 2009 |

    Simmons targets China growth as firm rethinks recruitment strategy

    Simmons & Simmons is planning to expand in mainland China, with the firm aiming to recruit local Chinese lawyers. The firm wants to hire local lawyers to gain access to Chinese clients and is looking to bring in partners in finance and corporate. It is also considering legal process outsourcing (LPO) to domestic firms in the region.

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  • November 25, 2009 |

    Quinn Emanuel raises stakes in Lehman-Barclays dispute

    The official creditors committee in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy fired the latest shot on Tuesday (24 November) in the dispute between Lehman and Barclays over whether Barclays received an improper 'windfall' in its purchase of Lehman's North American assets and liabilities last September. The dispute has been brewing for months and has resulted in several motions for discovery and at least three lawsuits. In short: Lehman, its creditors and the trustee of its estate allege that certain higher-ups at both Lehman and Barclays arranged - without the knowledge of Lehman's counsel at Weil Gotshal & Manges - to sell most of Lehman's North American assets to Barclays in late September 2008 under terms that were far too favourable to the buyer.

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  • November 25, 2009 |

    Restructuring and insolvency: Year of the living dead

    As the economy began to show signs of overheating during the peak of the credit boom between 2005 and 2007, many insolvency advisers were predicting the next big thing would be a wave of increasingly complex restructurings - accompanied by a frenetic round of debt trading. Accordingly, many of the funds and investment banks active in the sector set about bolstering their restructuring teams. Andrew Wilkinson's 2007 move from the leading London restructuring team of US firm Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft, which he built up during the late 1990s and early part of the decade, to head up Goldman Sachs' European restructuring advisory arm was only the most high-profile of a series of such moves.

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  • November 18, 2009 |

    Jones Day leads as Lehman files suit against Barclays over $5bn 'windfall'

    Jones Day has won a lead role on the latest lawsuit to arise from the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Lehman Brothers Holdings has filed suit against Barclays, claiming the bank received an undeserved windfall of at least $5bn (£3bn) when it purchased much of Lehman's North American operations after Lehman's collapse last September.

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  • November 13, 2009 |

    A&O and Wachtell take lead roles on $1.8bn General Electric sell-off

    Allen & Overy (A&O) has taken a lead role on the $1.8bn (£1.1bn) sale of General Electric's fire alarm and security unit to US conglomerate United Technologies, reports The Am Law Daily. Corporate partner Eric Shube led the magic circle firm's team on the deal, alongside employee benefits partner Henry Morgenbesser, regulatory partner Ken Rivlin and intellectual property partner Colleen Keck.

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  • November 13, 2009 |

    Deliver us from navel-gazing – some interesting deals at last

    In what will hopefully prove a sign of slightly less deal-phobic times, the emergence of a couple of interesting corporate bids has given me something to write about other than The Future Of Law (all well and good, but you can have too much of a good thing). The deals in question are Liberty Global's €3.5bn (£3.1bn) takeover of German cable group Unitymedia and the merger agreement between British Airways (BA) and Spanish flag carrier Iberia.

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  • November 9, 2009 |

    Lawyer headcount at US firms hit by steepest drop for over 30 years

    The US's largest law firms this year suffered the deepest cuts in lawyer numbers for more than three decades, reports The National Law Journal. During the 12 months from October 2008 to September 2009, the total number of lawyers working at the top 250 US law firms plunged by 5,259 to 126,669, compared with 131,928 last year.

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  • October 28, 2009 |

    Bourgeois revolution

    Earlier this year, Forbes magazine named General Electric (GE) as the largest company in the world in its annual Global 2000 list. GE employs 323,000 people globally (among them over 1,000 lawyers) across a range of businesses including electronics, healthcare and financial services. So when it comes to reviews of external legal advisers at the company, the processes involved are complex and lengthy: 18 months, in this case.

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