As Anthony Salz rides off into the sunset (and on to NM Rothchild’s board), City veterans have been ruminating over the end of an era. It is Salz, after all, who gets much of the credit for spearheading Freshfields’ complementary push into investment banking and M&A in the 1980s.
Such is the size of the big four international UK firms, it is now hard to imagine a single lawyer having anything like the influence on their firm’s future direction that was possible 20 years ago. Indeed, recent years have demanded an entirely different type of leader – the managing partner with the drive and attention to detail to make the overblown firms they inherited from their predecessors work. Tony Angel was one of the first of this breed to emerge. Clifford Chance’s (CC’s) David Childs is cut from similar cloth, as is David Harris at Lovells.
