There is an interesting piece from the always good–value Dominic Carman, writing in this month’s Legal Business, built around a meeting with Slaughter and May’s best friends alliance of European firms. But if Slaughters hoped the piece would extol the benefits of the best friends model a decade after Giles Henderson first started selling it to the market, I fear the firm will be disappointed.
The picture that emerges is of divergent agendas as Slaughters and its key continental allies strive not only to educate the market about what its alliance is about but also to define for themselves what they are trying to achieve. And issues like attempting to prod deal stats-providers to class the alliance as a single unit for the purpose of M&A rankings not only seem intellectually unsound but an unstable basis for top-flight professional services businesses to base their strategy.
