I knew this one was brewing for months. When Legal Week got around to its annual table of law firm results, there was always going to be a mind-numbing debate about how to treat the law firms put together with multiple profit centres.
In many ways, the days when UK tables from Legal Week or US tables from The American Lawyer neatly summed up the upper end of the global legal services market have already passed. With more than 1,500 lawyers working for foreign firms in London, the UK-based tables already fail to reflect a substantial element of the domestic market. Yet merely replacing them with global tables or UK-revenue specific figures in isolation doesn’t look that practical.
