Lawyering within tent
IT IS always a very bad idea for journalists to admit that they don’t understand something, but, as we are among friends, I’ll come clean.
I was reading the announcement last week of the merger between the US firms Pillsbury Winthrop and Shaw Pittman. It was the usual stuff — Top 20 firms, superior practice strength, extend market reach and so on — and then, like Alice in Wonderland, I seemed to have stumbled into a summer garden party for the well-heeled in the Hamptons. All the two firms could talk about was their “marquees”, or marquee practices. They were scattered everywhere across what I envisaged was the Great Gatsby’s endless lawns. There were marquees for capital markets, marquees for corporate finance, marquees for outsourcing and many more. Whether the marquees are full of louche lawyers, sipping champagne cocktails, I’m not sure. If you have any ideas about why these eminent firms should practise in striped tents rather than glass and steel office blocks, please let me know.
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Culinary practice
MEANWHILE, in Brussels, where work is more likely to be conducted in a restaurant over a bowl of frites, McDermott Will & Emery have managed to snaffle Stanbrook & Hooper. The firm, run by Clive Stanbrook, QC, has had a strong reputation and was a satisfying example of British excellence abroad. It is slightly sad, maybe, that they have thrown their lot in with Americans, given the strength of the London firms along the Rue de la Loi. Tellingly, however, Clive Stanbrook cites the merger of McDermott Will & Emery with Carnelutti in Milan as part of the inspiration for the move. Anyone who can keep a big-name Italian lawyer happy obviously has exquisite culinary skills and, for starters, McDermott’s chairman, Harvey Freishtat, has already been effusive in his praise for his Stanbrook colleagues. When it comes to keeping his European partners well fed, he is clearly a dab hand with the mayo.
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Marketing’s Holy Grail
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ANYTHING that helps to improve the quality of marketing and communications in law firms gets my vote so I am happy to welcome the introduction of a specialist diploma by the Professional Services Marketing Group.
The qualification, run by Cambridge Marketing Colleges, will, as I understand it, put marketing into the context of selling professional services rather than, say, cornflakes or dishwashers. With backing from people such as Anne-Marie Stebbings, the global marketing director at Linklaters, and the involvement of firms including Addleshaw Goddard, Baker & McKenzie, Denton Wilde Sapte and Lewis Silkin, it should do well. It seems to me, though, that the Holy Grail of professional marketing would be to make legal services desirable rather than merely essential. That is where the personal touch of the old-style solicitors perhaps had an advantage. In most cases, I suspect, friendship has gone from the client relationship in London. But it did add value to the hourly rate.
Have I got old jokes for you?
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THE Legal Business awards last Thursday underwent PrivateEyesation as the host, Ian Hislop, reran his comic’s old cover stories like a granddad shuffling through a family photo album. Star of the night was Stephenson Harwood’s John Fordham for tracking down Dame Shirley Porter’s millions for Westminster Council. Gotcha!
Edward Fennell
edward.fennell@virgin.net