Over the past five years investment banks have found it relatively easy to recruit top quality lawyers. Cynics might say that this has owed as much to the negatives of private practice as to the perceived positives of working in-house, but tales of high bonus payments, shorter working hours and, perhaps more nobly, better quality of work and closer proximity to the business, have resulted in the migration of some of the City’s best and brightest to investment banks.
Even when the market was at its height and candidates for law firms were in very short supply, such was the attraction of joining an investment bank, that banks were generally able to pull lawyers away from well-founded short to medium partnership prospects in City firms or financially outstanding offers from New York firms. Unlike most law firms, top investment banks have generally not had to compromise as much in either PQE or quality of candidate. This has enabled some legal departments, such as Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank, to build up exceptionally high quality in-house resources.
