Catrin Griffiths

We hope it wasn’t Simone Biles that elevated Ropes & Gray’s longstanding interest in Paris into something resembling a decision this summer. But it’s certainly suspicious that after years of…

Freshfields’ new branding, revealed this week by The Lawyer, has attracted plenty of attention for the deletion of its German heritage. But it’s also provoked deep scepticism. Lawyers who can barely…

The skip outside the now-defunct 9 Stone Buildings is a forlorn remnant of a 130-year history. But it’s a gift of a metaphor. Anyone following the shape of legal services will be increasingly aware…

There’s a blockage in the upper mid-market. The firms in the 11-20 ranking of The Lawyer UK200 have averaged 35 per cent growth since 2020, but none of them has broken away from the pack.

Some strategies date. Take the single-supplier model, where a private practice firm would handle all the day-to-day work for a company for a rate agreed in advance. This had a brief flourish after the…

Cravath Swaine & Moore has mounted a dramatic build-out of its English law debt finance practice in London with the hire of two Linklaters partners.

The iron law of the legal market is that the accountants don’t know how to grow a legal business. In 2002, three accountancy-tied law firms – K-Legal (KPMG), Garretts (Andersen Legal) and Landwell…

How’s your porridge this morning? Not too hot? Not too cold? We hope it’s just right, because it’s going to be today’s metaphor. Managing partners face a peculiar balancing act. Grow the firm to…

In our latest podcast celebrating the 20th edition of The Lawyer’s UK 200, editors Catrin Griffiths, Christian Smith and Richard Simmons are back to reveal the five firms in the second hundred of the…

We did try. We tried to think of another US firm in London aside from Cahill Gordon & Reindel that has launched, created a clear position in the market and then…