London was among our top performing offices alongside New York, Paris and Washington – Oliver Brettle, White & Case
Quinn and Winston also sit at either end of the spectrum when measuring operating profit per member. This stood at £1.55m for each of Quinn’s 15 members, compared with £13.7k at Winston, which has 11 members. This represents an 88% drop on last year’s profit per member figure for Winston, reflecting the similar drop in operating profit.
Peter Crowther, managing partner, Winston & Strawn London, said: “It is difficult to compare like for like as it’s Winston & Strawn’s first year as an LLP. However, it’s a year when we made significant investments including expanded office space and a number of prominent hires. We have a further programme of investment planned for the London office.”
Headcount
With large variation in office size – from 877 lawyers and support staff at KWM to 38 at Winston – there is also a significant disparity in the fee income generated per fee earner. At Quinn, this stood at £1.26m per lawyer, while Dentons’ lawyers brought in £385,000 on average. Even removing Quinn from the picture, fee earners at these firms bring in more than their counterparts at UK firms with similar revenues, with the average revenue per lawyer across the group standing at £571,400.
Looking at the group as a whole, lawyer and support staff numbers grew by 4.3% on average against a 1.4% increase in the number of members.
It’s a year when we made significant investments including expanded office space and a number of prominent hires – Peter Crowther, Winston & Strawn
International and US firms also spent less on their lawyer and support staff as a proportion of revenue than the average UK Top 50 firm. Average staff costs stood at £25.1m, ranging from £75.8m at Dentons down to £3.5m at Winston and Greenberg.
With the exception of KWM – which has a £20m bank loan – Mayer Brown and Dentons, none of the firms hold any bank debt, in contrast to many of their UK peers.
Giles Murphy, partner and head of assurance and business services at Smith & Williamson comments: “Trying to set out a separate class of American law firms doesn’t work so well these days. They are not quite so much a distinct category and are increasingly well integrated into the London, UK and European legal market and have become part of the mainstay. As firms get more established in the UK they are no longer treated like a 53rd state and partners tend to be paid in Sterling, acting for UK/international clients rather than being supported by the US.”
He adds: “The big, big issue for US firms is the role the UK has in the European environment – and this is something the UK firms should be worried about too. US firms probably see London as a bridgehead into the rest of Europe so where the UK is at the moment must create some uncertainty. If I was sitting in the US getting requests from London to grow I would be thinking should I put the funding there or actually would somewhere like Paris or Germany be a consideration.”
