As new firms continue to flock to London, the cautious growth of earlier entrants has been cast aside in favour of heavy investment and dramatic expansion. JDG Chambers reports
Talking about start-ups and entrepreneurship at the Bump and Grind coffee shop on the Old Street roundabout befits the area in Shoreditch now dubbed the Silicon Roundabout – the UK’s slightly less glamorous equivalent of California’s celebrated technology hub. Lately, though, these strange words and phrases have been overheard in the gilded streets of the City of London, courtesy of a budding group of law firms bred in cities like Dallas, Boston and Miami. These expansionist national firms have plunged straight into practising English law, largely eschewing the model set by the big wave of New York laws firms, which opened up in London in the 70s and 80s, staffing overseas outposts with US attorneys practising mainly US securities law.
