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Clifford Chance partners were paid more than £2mn last year as the law firm achieved double-digit profit growth, driven in part by high-profile litigation work including the defence of former Autonomy chief executive Mike Lynch.
Equity partners — the top tier of lawyers at the firm — took home £2.04mn on average in the financial year to the end of April. Partnership profits as a whole were up 10 per cent, to £856mn, excluding non-equity partners and partner annuities.
Clifford Chance, which is a member of London’s elite “magic circle” of corporate-focused law firms, has invested heavily in hiring partners over the past year, and benefited from an uptick in dealmaking in the UK and Europe.
It was also helped by the completion of a number of long-running litigation proceedings. Overall, the firm’s revenues increased 9 per cent over the year, to £2.3bn.
Clifford Chance’s results echo those of magic circle peers Linklaters and A&O Shearman, which also recently reported a rebound in their revenues and profits, thanks to a recovery in dealmaking.
All three firms have invested significantly in the US — the world’s largest legal market. A&O Shearman is itself the product of a $3.5bn merger between the UK’s Allen & Overy and New York’s Shearman & Sterling, which completed in May.
In the US, Clifford Chance increased its revenues by 28 per cent, as it successfully defended tech entrepreneur Lynch in one of Silicon Valley’s biggest fraud cases. His 12-week trial capped a more than decade-long saga for the law firm.
In the UK, notable successes included defeating a £1bn damages claim brought against its client EE by Phones 4U over alleged collusion in the telecoms market. Clifford Chance also advised Virgin Money on its £2.9bn takeover by Nationwide.
“What we’ve seen is . . . an ordinary cycle of litigation takes the place of frenzied transactional markets . . . [and], actually, the pedal didn’t go off [M&A markets] as much as people feared,” Charles Adams, the firm’s global managing partner, told the Financial Times.
“When I look back, [the year] started with still quite a stuttering transactional space [and] strong litigation, but we’re seeing . . . one continue and the other start up again,” he added.
Like its UK peers, Clifford Chance has lost partners to US rivals in recent years, as several elite American outfits invested heavily in the London market.
However, the UK firm has been aggressively hiring in its own right, with 29 partners joining from competitors last year, in addition to the 29 partners that it created through internal promotions.