The firm turned over £207m globally, largely as a result of organic growth in a 2017/18 financial year less defined by international expansion than previous periods. Profits per equity partner (PEP) also grew by a healthy 17% to £750,000.

In a performance which managing partner Michael Chissick hailed as ‘outstanding’, the UK business brought in £135.6m, up on last year’s £110. The firm was in April named the Law Firm of the Year at the 2018 Legal Business Awards.

The results were certainly a nice birthday present for Chissick, who turned 53 this week, with the firm more than doubling its revenue under his watch over the last five years. The 117% growth from £95m in 2012/13 speaks volumes of his success in reinventing a business which was going through a near-crisis situation when he took on his management role.

‘All of the offices have grown,’ Chissick told Legal Business. ‘We had a very strong year in the tech sector and particularly in GDPR privacy work – we are the go-to firm for that type of work. We had a very strong run in litigation and international arbitration.’

The firm recently added life sciences, which brought in £11.5m, as its fourth area of focus, alongside financial services, energy and natural resources, and technology. Chissick added: ‘Our sector strategy is paying off very well.’

The firm’s alternative legal services platform Condor, which in October last year entered South Africa, also boosted revenue for the firm. Launched in January 2017, the platform combining document data management and technology solutions with low-cost legal expertise turned over more than £2m.

‘We are a very happy partnership,’ said Chissick, who pointed to the firm not losing a single partner over the year, while bringing in a record 22 laterals.

Although the global growth was relatively slower than last year’s record 36%, it came on the back of comparatively subdued international expansion, only opening new offices in Bologna, Amsterdam and Shanghai.

While the UK accounted for 65% of revenue, Germany grew by 46% to £13m, becoming the second largest source of foreign income for the firm after France’s £14m. The Brussels office was third at £11m.

‘We are becoming more international, that’s my message,’ said Chissick. More recently the firm added offices in Frankfurt and Luxembourg and is looking to launch in Madrid and Barcelona.

The firm was more cautious on forecasting future revenue growth, pointing to expectations closer to high single-digit improvements. But Chissick said: ‘We started the year well, there seems to be good activity level. I’m optimistic.’

In other financial results unveiled this month, fellow mid-market high performer Osborne Clarke reported 14% global revenue growth to €273m.

For more on Fieldfisher’s and Osborne Clarke’s reinvention, see Reversal of Fortunes (£).

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2. Deliveroo chases Just Eat with plan to sign up 5,000 UK eateries [via The Guardian]

3. ‘Provocative’ pictures of Meghan Markle show payout over topless Kate Middleton photos was wrong, magazine to argue [via The Telegraph]

4. Copyright law could put end to net memes [via BBC News]

5. Dixons Carphone admits huge data breach [via BBC News]

6. Uber applies for patent to spot drunk passengers [via BBC News]

7. New Look tumbles to £234m loss as sales slump [via Sky News]

8. AT&T acquisition of Time Warner cleared by judge [via Sky News]

A host of firms across the globe advised as French property company, Unibail-Rodamco, completed its acquisition of shopping centre operator Westfield last week, in a deal first announced late last year. The combined $72bn entity owns and operates 102 shopping centres in 13 countries, the majority of which are in Europe and the US.

For Unibail-Rodamco, a group of firms including Darrois Villey Malliot Brochier, Allens, NautaDutilh, Shearman & Sterling, Clifford Chance and Capstan Avocats advised on the transaction. UK Magic Circle firm Allen & Overy (A&O) provided tax advice, led by London tax partner James Burton, alongside Dutch heavyweight Loyens & Loeff and French firm Lacourte Raquin Tatar.

Australia-headquartered Westfield was represented by King & Wood Mallesons (KWM), Skadden Arps, Slate Meagher & Flom, Greenberg Traurig and Debevoise & Plimpton. Sydney-based M&A partner Jason Watts led for KWM while London M&A partner Michael Goldberg headed Greenberg Traurig’s team. Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) and Greenwoods provided Australian tax advice.

The acquisition, completed 7 June, led to the departure of longstanding Westfield UK and Europe GC Leon Shelley (pictured), who had joined the company 13 years ago from Skadden. His role will be split in two, with deputy GC Amanda Beattie taking on the role of UK GC, while senior legal counsel Maurizio Redondi becomes head of legal in Italy.

Shelley told Legal Business it was natural for there to be changes with any acquisition, particularly when you are on the side being acquired. Senior Westfield executives Shelley admired had recently departed with the deal, including Australian billionaire and co-founder Frank Lowy, along with Lowy’s sons Steven and Peter.

‘It’s going to be a different company going forward. For me, it’s an opportunity to go and do something very different.’

Shelley said another from the 14-strong legal team, who he declined to name, was also departing. Shelley had received multiple approaches for other roles but planned to take the summer off before deciding on his next move.

‘I don’t want to rush this decision, and may even decide to do something outside the law. I want to do something that excites me.’

Elsewhere, the demise of another high street brand has seen DLA take the lead role advising Poundworld after it went into administration on Monday (11 June).

US private equity player TPG Capital acquired Poundworld in 2015 from its founder, Christopher Edwards, for £150m. The chain operates 335 stores from its head office in Normanton, West Yorkshire, with about 8,000 product lines including groceries, toiletries, cleaning and confectionary items mostly priced at £1. But about 5,100 jobs are now at risk after a buyer could not be found for the business, and Deloitte was appointed administrator.

A DLA team led by Leeds-based corporate restructuring partner Richard Obank is advising Poundworld. The retailer’s failure coincides with a string of other high-profile retail insolvencies, including toy superstore Toys R Us and high street electronics chain Maplin in February.

Deloitte administrator Clare Boardman commented: ‘The retail trading environment in the UK remains extremely challenging and Poundworld has been seeking to address this through a restructure of its business. Unfortunately, this has not been possible. We still believe a buyer can be found for the business or at least part of it and we are keeping staff appraised of developments as they happen.’

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The firm released on 8 June what regional chief executive Jeremy Cohen described its ‘strongest ever set of financial results’, in which its top line grew 22% to £203.1m.

This was naturally bolstered by revenue from legacy Scottish firm Maclay Murray & Spens, which merged with Dentons in November last year. That brought three new offices in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow into the firm’s network, increasing UK lawyer headcount to more than 800. Partner numbers grew to 207 from last year’s 160.

Cohen said that without the merger, revenue would have grown 9%.

‘As the global platform of Dentons grows and integrates more strongly, we get more opportunities through that,’ he told Legal Business. ‘The UK and Middle East are very international places, so we get more international work.’

The eye-catching rise in PEP follows a disappointing 2016/17, when it fell 9% to £481,000 amid a modest 1% increase in revenue to £166.4m.

Cohen commented: ‘Last year we had made a lot of investment, hired a lot of people, built out our practices, took on a new office in Watford – things we are very pleased to see are growing well.

Since 2013/14, Dentons’ top line has grown 39%, with PEP rising 60%. He added: ‘It’s the five-year trend that tells the real story.’

The firm’s work around the Carillion collapse was one of the key sources of revenues this year. It has been advising the Cabinet Office and the liquidator.

‘The restructuring part of the business is stronger than it has been for some time,’ Cohen said.

On the corporate side, Dentons advised KKR on the due diligence and carve-out aspects of its £6bn acquisition of Unilever’s spreads businesses and real estate investment company Aprirose as it bought QHotels for £525 million.

Dentons has recently reshuffled its regional management. Cohen was in December re-elected regional chief executive until 2021 after his role changed last summer to only cover Europe and the Middle East. The firm established a separate governance for Africa at the same time, led by Noor Kapdi. Dentons also made the unusual move of hiring a non-lawyer to run its day-to-day operations, appointing former RBS director Lisa Sewell as managing director, replacing Brandon Ransley who retired earlier this year.

Cohen concluded: ‘It’s probably been a much stronger market environment this year than many of us would have anticipated. We all have to expect some degree of volatility [for the next financial year]. That does not mean that it won’t be a strong year.’

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The latest twist in the multi-billion pound takeover of Sky has seen a team led by Slaughters corporate partner Richard Smith advising Disney on a bid for Sky News. This after a UK government decision last week (5 June) that Rupert Murdoch-owned 21st Century Fox could pursue its £18.5bn bid for the 61% of Sky it did not already own on the condition it sells Sky News.

UK culture secretary Matt Hancock said he agreed with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) that divesting Sky News to Disney, or to an alternative suitable buyer, with an agreement to ensure it is funded for at least ten years, is likely to be the most proportionate and effective remedy for the public interest concerns that have been identified.

21st Century Fox, advised by Allen & Overy (A&O), had put its bid in for Sky in December 2016, valuing the UK-listed media and telecoms giant at £10.75 a share.

But then earlier this year, Philadelphia-headquartered broadcasting heavyweight Comcast threatened to thwart that deal, offering what it called a ‘superior’ £22bn cash proposal of £12.50 a share, a 16% increase in value on 21st Century Fox’s offer.

Acting for Comcast on its bid for Sky is a London-based Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer team, as well as Davis Polk & Wardwell out of New York. Meanwhile, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett are advising 21st Century Fox on its bid, while Sky is advised by Herbert Smith Freehills.

Sky has been coveted for years. In 2010, News Corp made an £8bn takeover bid for Sky, only to withdraw a year later because of the phone-hacking trial. Regulatory concerns regarding media ownership have also been raised around combining Murdoch’s News Corp media giant with Europe’s largest pay-TV broadcaster.

HSF and A&O also led for Sky and 21st Century Fox in 2014, when Sky (then called BskyB) concluded a deal worth up to £7.4bn to buy European sister companies Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia from 21st Century Fox.

In another big-ticket deal, an Ashurst team led by partners Jason Radford and Nick Rainsford advised an infrastructure investor consortium fronted by Dalmore Capital on its acquisition of Cory Riverside Energy, the owner of the UK’s largest energy-from-waste plant in London, for more than £1.5bn.

The consortium, including Canadian fund manager Fiera Infrastructure, Semperian PPP Investment Partners, and Swiss Life Asset Managers – the investment arm of insurance company Swiss Life – is buying all of Cory.

The sellers, distressed debt investor Strategic Value Partners, EQT Credit, Commerzbank and other shareholders, were advised by a Linklaters team led by partner Ben Rodham.

Strategic Value Partners, Commerzbank and EQT Credit took over Cory in 2015 amid a debt-to-equity restructuring which also saw Cory sell its non-core businesses in waste collection and landfill & gas to refocus on its core energy recovery facility. Cory’s debt was then restructured last year with £540m of debt facilities.

Cory’s energy-from-waste plant in Belvedere, east London, has been operational since 2012 and has an annual capacity of around 750,000 tonnes of residual waste.

Financial advisers on the sell-side were JP Morgan and Credit Suisse while Macquarie Capital and Rothschild advised the buyers.

Further afield, but also notable because of its size, a Bain Capital-led consortium’s US$18bn acquisition of Toshiba’s semiconductor business also kept a host of advisers busy.

The deal saw the Bain Capital consortium, which includes Apple, Seagate, Kingston, Hoya, Dell Technologies and SK Hynix, acquire the Japanese conglomerate’s Toshiba Memory business.

A Ropes & Gray team led by private equity partner Tsuyoshi Imai advised Bain Capital and a Dechert team led by Hong Kong corporate partner David Cho ‎and London finance partner John Markland advised SK Hynix.

A Morrison & Foerster team advised Toshiba, led by Tokyo managing partner Ken Siegel, corporate partner Ivan Smallwood, TTG partner Stuart Beraha and litigation partner Louise Stoupe.

Linklaters advised the banks – SMBC, MUFG, Mizuho Bank on their provision of 600bn yen ($5.5bn) of senior facilities for the acquisition. The Linklaters team was cross-jurisdictional and multi-practice, led by Zenya Onishi, banking counsel of Linklaters Tokyo and Davide Mencacci, banking partner of Linklaters Hong Kong.

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OC posted double-digit growth in both global and UK revenue for the 2017/18 financial year, up 14% to €273m and 15% to £139.3m respectively. Growth rates for both businesses are ahead of last year’s 12% and 7% increases, although down on growth from the year before that.

UK net profit grew 17% to £61.2m, while profit per equity partner (PEP) jumped from £642,000 to £711,000. Its cash resources were steady at £23.1m.

OC UK managing partner Ray Berg told Legal Business the firm had seen consistent performance across all its practice groups and sectors in what he called strong market conditions.

The UK accounted for roughly 58% of the firm’s revenue for the second year running, down slightly from the year before that. Berg said this was about the right split after a period of international expansion.

‘We obviously want to continue to grow the business consistently across all of the offices but we’ve got to a position now where –yes – the UK is still the largest but you can see we’ve got a significant international business as well.

‘We’re beneficiaries of that in the UK, and not just from international workflows, but it also gives us a credence in the UK market with clients we didn’t have before.’

OC has been adding global offices over the last five years, and in the past year opened in Sweden and Shanghai, the latter under the name Zhang Yu & Partners. Simon Beswick, the firm’s international chief executive, told Legal Business attention would shift to growing the operations it had set up.

‘The game for us now is all about adding strength and depth in all of those offices. It’s not going to be about new office openings but what you should be hearing about is adding partners and adding people in those offices, as well as clients and work wins.’

The firm added 32 partners last year – including 15 in the UK – through lateral hires and internal promotions. In the UK it was appointed to the Department for Transport panel for the first time and was reappointed to panels for the Pension Protection Fund and Vodafone.

It also plans to invest in its OC Solutions business, which works on client-specific issues, to more jurisdictions. The team of about ten in the UK and a couple more in Germany has worked on about six projects – including developing a cloud-based platform for Vodafone’s property legal work – and has about as many on the go at the moment.

The key question for OC, however, will be how it can maintain the momentum which has seen it be one of only three firms in the current UK top 100 to have more than doubled its revenue organically since 2012.

Speaking from that Brussels office, which has grown from seven lawyers to 25 since it opened, Berg agreed: ‘That’s the challenge. We’ve continued to set the bar very high for ourselves. The firm continues to grow and get bigger and it is really important we maintain our culture.’

Beswick added: ‘Brexit will at some point change those market conditions but it’s good all around our business at the moment. We can’t grumble.’

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7. Fifa files criminal complaint against ticket site Viagogo [via The Guardian]

Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy on Monday (4 June) announced that its associates will earn between $190,000 and $330,000 from 1 July.

In a move that will lead to intense pressure among Wall Street peers to raise the established starting salary for new lawyers from $180,000 to match Milbank, the firm’s associate pay bands will rise between $10,000 and $15,000 depending on seniority.

Touted as ensuring the New York shop offers ‘compensation at the top of the market’, the changes will involve all of the firm’s 500 associates, including 100 in London. Associates in their first to third year will see their salary increase by $10,000, while those from the fourth to eighth will take home $15,000 more.

‘We are fortunate to be doing very well,’ London co-managing partner Julian Stait told Legal Business. ‘Our associates are our greatest asset and we want to recognise their incredible contribution.’

Revenue at Milbank grew 7% to hit $916.54m last year, while profit per equity partner rose 11% to $3.46m, underlining its position among the top 15 Manhattan firms.

Stait denied any concern on the impact on profits: ‘Any cost has an impact to some degree, but we have got very strong profitability, so we expect our profits to hold up. In the medium to long run, the fact that we have such a stellar group of associates is a key part of the reason why we are so profitable. It is an investment in the future.’

Milbank’s salary hike follows the firm’s changes in 2016, prompted by Manhattan leader Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s announcement that it was boosting first year associates’ pay by $20,000, to $180,000.

Though there has been some expectations that 2018 would go without further rises at top global firms, Milbank’s move promises to further heat up City salaries, with many leading US firms benchmarking their London teams to domestic pay scales.

Such a move would further widen the gap between leading US firms and City counterparts. For comparison, Allen & Overy and Clifford Chance both increased their bands for junior lawyers 3% with newly-qualified (NQ) solicitors earning £81,000.

Such dynamics are a reminder that while much of the commercial legal industry is wrestling with far more cost-conscious clients, the highest reaches of the profession operate in an increasingly detached orbit.

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Check out how much other Lex 100 firms pay here.

Buyout house Bowmark Capital is acquiring BCLP’s entire stake of 62% in LOD for an undisclosed sum. The sale is expected to carry a multi-million pound price tag and represent a significant windfall for BCLP, which was formed by the merger earlier this year of Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) and US law firm Bryan Cave. James Lever at Livingstone Partners advised BCLP and LOD’s shareholders, while Stephenson Harwood advised Bowmark on the deal with a team lead by Jonathan Pittal. Jessica Adams at Macfarlanes advised for LOD and Alex Lewis at Baker McKenzie represented the management.

The contract lawyer business, which launched back in 2007 as part of BLP, two years ago merged with Australia’s AdventBalance, and last year posted global turnover of £35m, up 15% annually. The firm, which has operated as a separate business to BLP for six years, has expanded dramatically over the last decade to become one of the most high profile New Law brands in the UK.

Further weakening its links with BCLP will not only prime the business for further growth but make it easier for LOD to build on the 2015 deal with DLA Piper to widen its services to other major law firms. The business had initially focused largely on providing locum lawyers and services to in-house legal teams. After the sale, LOD will maintain a contractual relationship with BCLP to provide services.

‘We absolutely will be working with other law firms, but it wasn’t the primary driver for [the sale],’ LOD co-founder Simon Harper (pictured) told Legal Business. ‘It’s about a faster growth model with new service lines in new territories. It does feel like an important next step. The level of interest and excitement in the sector made the process very easy.’

LOD managing director Tom Hartley commented: ‘This deal was three to four months in the making. We wanted to make sure we had the right partners to back the growth model we have in place here.’ LOD expects to see double-digit revenue growth this year.

LOD has ten offices including multiple sites in each of Australia and Asia, as well as London, New York, Munich and Dubai. It has more than 650 lawyers and consultants on its books and more than 500 corporate and law firm clients. Bowmark, meanwhile, invests in UK mid-market companies and has £850m under management.

BCLP partner Neville Eisenberg commented: ‘BCLP has committed to remain close to LOD, partnering with the business for its flexible lawyer needs and we look forward to seeing the results of this exciting new chapter in LOD’s development.’

BCLP, meanwhile, has far from turned from legal innovation after earlier this month announcing the launch of legal tech start-up in Swiftagree.

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