Being in its own way such a tight community, a few isolated episodes can have an impact for a very long time within the global-yet-narrow confines of the commercial legal profession. As such, the experiences of just two US law firms nearly a decade ago - Chicago’s Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal and Weil Gotshal & Manges - still to a certain extent define the image of American firms in London.
For those with short memories, Sonnenschein ‘enjoyed’ possibly its only moment of substantial influence on the global legal market in 2000 when it closed its 11-lawyer City arm. Almost as dramatic, the very public spectacle of internal wrangling between Weil Gotshal’s London arm and New York HQ, had a similar impact around the same time.
