With financial results from CC, Freshfields and Linklaters coming out pretty much as expected, I haven’t currently got much to add. You can feel the tectonic plates of the industry and its hierarchy shifting, but that has been evident since late 2008.
However, there is one aspect that stands out from talking to City firms, and that is the extent to which the concept of scale has become almost a bogeyman for top law firms. In particular, there is much discussion from Linklaters and Freshfields about how no one cares about size anymore. What else could explain both firms making so little of ending CC’s long reign as the UK’s largest law firm in revenue terms? Such sentiments are, I think, largely related to CC’s colossal struggles with scale over the last decade, which, despite its best efforts, have yet to be entirely resolved. Freshfields and Linklaters, for their own part, remain scarred by their own post-merger hassles in Europe between 2002 and 2005 and have no intention of repeating past mistakes.
