So was Peter Cornell just lucky? Or can ‘the man from Spain’ – as one partner described him on the day he was elected managing partner – take the credit for steering the firm out of the crisis that gripped it during much of his term?
There is one sense in which Cornell, who will be leaving Clifford Chance (CC) at the end of they year, was definitely lucky. In normal circumstances, he would not have been an obvious candidate to lead the firm. But the summer of 2002 could not in any sense be described as normal. The merger that the firm had forged with Rogers & Wells two years earlier had run into the trouble. And the partnership, which felt it had not been consulted properly about the deal, was angry.
