The sense among City lawyers is that this is the way it was supposed to be all along. After spending the late 1990s building up pan-European deal teams, only to see cross-border M&A largely dry up, the big firms finally have a market they can get their teeth into.
The third-quarter deal figures confirm the scale of that revival, with the last three months registering as the most active quarter for five years, accelerating the substantial pre-summer recovery. Deal value is now roughly twice that of the same period in 2004, reflecting much larger strategic public deals, though volume is little changed.
