What is it about the UK finance market that makes it so resistant to the idea of commoditisation? Certainly, in an era in which structured products have driven the debt markets, much of the work is complex. But, of course, it is exactly this product innovation that rapidly turns the cutting-edge into the cookie-cutter.
How law firms respond to these pressures has long been a dilemma for top banking firms. Firms like Allen & Overy (A&O) and Clifford Chance (CC) naturally take pride in their work on the most innovative finance deals. But the reality is that profitable banking practices increasingly have to manage the tricky and sometimes contradictory balancing act of innovating at one end of the market, while deploying battalions of junior troops to churn out what has become vanilla debt at the other end.
