A decade ago a UK lawyer wanting to work for a US law firm in London really had to be an established corporate or banking lawyer from a magic circle firm, able to hit the ground running in complex international deals. As one by one the Wall Street powerhouses crossed the Atlantic, speculation was rife as to their long-term commitment or viability. Despite this, and trepidation about high billable hours and aggressive hire-fire mentalities, the prospect of huge salaries helped to tempt enough lawyers to leave the relative security of their UK practices.
Since then, the trickle of American firms arriving turned into a flow of more and increasingly diverse firms from New York, Chicago and California (and many places in between), each with differing cultures, goals and business strategies. The variety of UK lawyers they sought to attract has broadened in similar perspective. With increasingly wide-ranging practice areas covering IP/IT, employment, pensions, insurance and litigation, opportunities developed for lawyers from a greater variety of practices. The driving factors bringing US firms to London are generally consistent: the demands of clients and the need to handle the UK and European aspects of deals and the ability to offer US legal advice to their clients in Europe, in particular US financial institutions. But while some firms have just opened small UK offices with handful of lawyers (usually a mix of US secondees and UK recruits) handling US generated work, others have developed larger and more expansive business strategies, generating work here and providing a fuller service offering to UK clients.
