‘New York firms are much more successful here than London law firms have been in New York.’ This was the controversial view espoused by Kenneth MacRitchie, managing partner of the London office of Shearman & Sterling (and a UK-qualified former Clifford Chance partner) earlier this year.

Is it fair to say that the Americans are beating the Brits on their home turf? The view is correct ‘up to a point’, reflects Tony Williams, founder of the management consultancy Jomati and former Clifford Chance managing partner. There are certainly plenty of them – there are now well over 100 US firms in London. However, those that have made a real market impact are relatively small in number.

But, as Williams points out, his old firm now has more than 300 lawyers in New York, while almost all the magic circle firms (with the exception of Slaughter and May) each have more than 150 lawyers there. ‘If that is failure, I would like to see success,’ he says.

Nor has the transatlantic journey been smooth for US firms. Coming to London ‘isn’t like entering other parts of the world’, Williams says. ‘You’re coming to a conservative and mature market, and to be successful you have to have a very clear and compelling story. The number of US firms that have made serious breakthroughs is very small and others are looking to expand by lateral hires or mergers. Mergers will become a bitter issue as the downturn bites.’

The signs are that US firms are, if not battening down the hatches, putting checks on their more expansionist ambitions. Caution appears to be the new watchword. Weil Gotshal’s London office, the second biggest in its network, was set up 12 years ago and now fields 120 lawyers, with 23 partners. London managing partner Mike Francies reckons the London office’s anticipated growth in fee-earners over the next 18 months will be a cautious ‘less than 10%’.

‘We definitely plan to increase headcount, but we aren’t going to do it just for the sake of doing it,’ he says. ‘If the right people come we’re committed to investing, but we don’t need to invest just for the sake of saying that we have more people.’

Julian Thurston, managing partner of Morrison & Foerster’s London office, says: ‘If you take the absolute growth of US law firms at the moment, it is pretty much zero.’ Morrison & Foerster has 50 lawyers and 19 London partners in the UK. He reckons most US firms saw ‘pretty strong growth’ in the first half of financial year 2007/08, ‘tailing off to a pretty rubbish fourth quarter’. Nonetheless, he describes the mood at Morrison & Foerster as ‘quietly confident – but that quiet confidence also means we are in a position, because we are on-budget, to think of taking certain investment decisions’.

Thurston argues that an uncertain economy can be an opportunity for certain types of firm, including a west coast firm such as Morrison & Foerster, with its expertise in technology, life sciences and finance. ‘We are part of a worldwide firm,’ he adds. ‘Some of those worldwide firms are having a tough time, particularly some New York-led firms, because of their exposure on areas like securities work and private-equity driven M&A. Other firms not so exposed, like ourselves, continue to motor on.’

London calling

Peter Finlay, senior partner at the London office of New York firm White & Case, says his firm has seen London and New York as the two key financial centres for a very long time. White & Case has been in London since 1971, when ‘people were not practising English law, there were no reciprocal rights, and it was not the global market then’, he says. The firm now has 434 legal staff in London, including 267 English-qualified lawyers.

‘It is a full-service office and the vast majority of our lawyers here are English-qualified,’ he says. ‘Most of the work is generated out of the London office, whereas there are other models where the offices are there to support American clients in Europe.’

Finlay says that White & Case is one of the first US firms to have its own trainee programme, taking on 35-40 trainees at each intake. ‘We have people who have come from that trainee programme right the way through to being promoted to partners,’ he says. ‘The full cycle can take 10-12 years.’

Shearman & Sterling is another long-standing member of the London US law firm ex-pat community. The Wall Street giant has 26 partners and 154 fee-earners in London. ‘The firm has been in London for a very long time,’ explains partner Anthony Ward, ‘originally practising solely New York law and New York securities work.’ The English law practice started in 1996, led by Kenneth MacRitchie, and Ward joined two years later alongside three finance partners from Ashursts.

‘At the time the high-yield bond market was beginning to start up in Europe,’ he says. ‘We saw an opportunity to combine English law finance practice with the capability of Shearman & Sterling, and the office has grown from there.’ When Ward joined in 1998, ‘about 70% of the work was New York law and 30% was English law’ and now, ‘roughly speaking, it’s the other way around’.

Does Ward subscribe to his colleague’s view of New York firms outperforming their City rivals on their home soil? ‘I think so,’ he replies. ‘We are roughly the same size as our rivals’ New York offices. We are broadly comparable and we probably get a higher proportion of leading transactions than they do in the New York market. Certainly, my New York partners would say that [UK competitor] firms rarely appear on the transactions.’

How important is London to Shearman? ‘We are pursuing a global strategy, not a strategy of having an office "in every port",’ Ward replies. ‘It is important to the firm to be able to represent its global clients in what it perceives to be the key jurisdictions and to provide them with legal services under English law, not only in London but also elsewhere in the world. You can’t think about a global strategy without a London office, given the importance of London from a financial institution perspective, which is obviously a big part of our business, but [is] also [important] for clients accessing the Middle East, central Europe and Russia.’

There has been criticism of Shearman’s alleged lack of a coherent international strategy as evidenced, commentators have said, by partner defection, including losing its entire 30-lawyer Mannheim office. Tony Williams was even quoted as calling it a ‘tragedy’.

Ward denies any crisis. He argues that critical press reports link ‘unrelated events’, such as the Mannheim departures and management changes, ‘to make a story’. He says he cannot comment on the Mannheim departure other than to say: ‘No way do we regard their departure as a negative.’ He also rules out plans for a merger – which is apparently the solution, according to the firm’s critics.

Merger in the first

The transatlantic merger is a well-established path for US firms to develop a presence in the City, such as Reed Smith’s tie-up with Richards Butler in 2006, or Jones Day and Gouldens in 2003. Jones Day has 190 fee-earners in London, 95% of whom are UK-qualified, and is in the top-five US firms in the City. Russell Carmedy, head of the London office, describes the firm as ‘recruiting laterally quite aggressively’ with three partner recruits last year.

Does an economic downturn mean the American firms are concentrating more on Europe? ‘That is certainly not a strategy at Jones Day,’ says Carmedy. ‘Our strategy is to have a fully global operation. We have 20% of our lawyers in Europe and we would like to make that a higher proportion.’

How important is London in the firm’s 29-office network? ‘The managing partner always makes the point at some juncture that the two highest priorities for the law firm in terms of office growth are London and New York,’ Carmedy says. ‘Normally he puts them in that order.’ He also points out however, that, in terms of size, London is fourth or fifth – ‘very similar in size to Dallas’.

The Cleveland-based firm has a history of growth through merger and was reported in the legal press as pairing up with Denton Wilde Sapte – a ‘total non-story’, according to Carmedy. ‘I did meet with Dentons to chat about the meaning of life and global practice – but there was never any serious discussion,’ he says. So are there plans for any more mergers? ‘Never say never,’ he replies.

But what does the UK partner get out of the transatlantic merger? Roger Parker, managing partner of Europe and the Middle East at Reed Smith (previously managing partner at the subsumed Richards Butler), explains that, before the merger, his old firm ‘saw the future of legal services on an international level as being disbursed through very large international businesses, with practices through the key markets of the US, Europe, Middle East and Asia’. But Richards Butler felt it ‘did not feel correctly positioned from a resource perspective to achieve that objective’. The firm now has 330 lawyers, up from 250 pre-merger. Its Europe and Middle East practice has recruited 20 new partners in 18 months.

How would Carmedy characterise Jones Day’s change since the 2003 merger? ‘Most lawyers would say that the atmosphere and culture in the offices is virtually unchanged,’ he says. ‘What they would also say is that the quality of the clients and the quality of the matters for those clients we are working on is far higher because we now participate in a global offering.’

Mergers are notoriously difficult to pull off, not least when the Atlantic separates the two entities. Carmedy says any merger issues, ‘to the extent that there were any’, were resolved by 2005. ‘They were exacerbated by the very poor market conditions for legal services that prevailed in 2003/04, the post-dotcom era and the post-11 September terrorist attacks era, when everybody was struggling, and we were no exception.’

The ‘physical integration’ of a merger is ‘challenging’, says Parker. ‘Integration is not an 18-month process, it is three years or more.’ What about those transatlantic cultural differences? Parker says he does not regard the issue as ‘a US/UK’ thing but rather more a question of the ‘indigenous cultures of any particular law firm’.

‘We are creating an international legal services firm,’ he says. ‘We’re not trying to create a US firm in London, or a UK firm in the US.’

UK is viewed as centre of international finance

‘Big business beware’ – so began a Sunday Times article in March 2007 announcing the arrival in the UK of ‘litigation supremo’ Michael Hausfeld and his Washington firm Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll.

As European managing partner Rob Murray explains: ‘We have a very particular proposition which is claimant-only collective actions.’

Speaking last year to the Gazette’s sister publication Litigation Funding, Hausfeld explained the firm’s European vision. ‘We will specialise in more complex litigation,’ said the lawyer best known for representing Alaskans hit by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill (inset), Texaco workers in a record-breaking $176m alleged racial discrimination case, victims of the Holocaust in their action against Swiss banks, and South African victims of apartheid. ‘We are going to concentrate initially on the competition area because that is where we feel there is a great shortcoming in terms of European victims having access to justice and the means to restitution to which they are rightfully entitled.’

Murray, previously a panel member of the Competition Commission, explains the thinking behind this: ‘What we are not doing is class action work, because we do not advocate that there is a class action along the American lines. The best phrase for us is "collective redress".’ The London office is staffed by UK lawyers – three partners, an associate and a consultant – and is so far best known for its legal action against British Airways and Virgin Atlantic on behalf of passengers over price-fixing.

‘A lot of the publicity around BA/Virgin was to do with the individuals who bought the tickets, but the biggest claim by far will be by the businesses who have been buying tickets,’ Murray says. The firm has had more than 1,200 businesses registering ‘from small businesses to household names and multinationals’. He adds: ‘A lot of our work, particularly in the cartel area, will effectively be acting on behalf of often small and medium-sized businesses.’ The firm was also involved in the marine hoses cartel case, the first prosecution under the Enterprise Act 2003, in which three British executives were jailed this year.

Hausfeld is on-record as wanting to establish a formalised network of like-minded firms stretching from ‘Canada, Australia through to Europe, Asia and Africa’. Murray says: ‘We have an existing and growing number of good relationships with firms in different parts of Europe. Nothing that I can say too much about at the moment, however, as we are building our European network.’ The London office was ‘always intended to be the European office rather than the UK office’.

‘We are here partly because of traditional reasons of language, culture and so on, but more importantly we are focusing on competition law claims,’ says Murray. ‘The Competition Appeal Tribunal is the only specialist competition court in Europe, and London is by far the biggest centre of international finance. For us it was the right place to locate a European practice.’

The US firm worked with British firms on the failed action by UK litigants in the US against the manufacturers of the anti-arthritis drug Vioxx. ‘We are working towards being the only firm on the claimant’s side who could take a properly international perspective on where clients should pursue their claim,’ says Murray. ‘It isn’t a question of cases where it might be better to sue in the US. There may be cases where it is better to sue in Holland, Germany or even outside of Europe, depending on who the clients are and what the claim is.’

Jon Robins is a freelance journalist