Unfortunately for pundits, the Legal Week/Mergermarket primary adviser table, which tracks advisers with lead M&A roles on Europe’s top corporate deals, is another reminder that the back-of-the-envelope predictions about the legal profession in the mid-1990s were, in the main, boringly spot-on.
The rise of the one-stop-shops, global firms, consolidation and so on… they all seemed so simple – crass even – as trends to define a proud profession. There were plenty who were sure they had identified clever, sophisticated reasons why it wasn’t so with law.
