DLA Piper
No of UK Partners: 345
No of UK Assistant Solicitors: 771
Other UK Fee Earners: 311
www.dlapiper.com
DLA Piper's ultimate ambition is to be a top five full service global law firm and it’s some way on the road to achieving this aim. The firm has developed a London office which is the envy of its national rivals, an international network spanning 29 offices in 21 jurisdictions and, at the time of writing, looked set to become the first national firm to pull off a transatlantic merger.
In Birmingham, however, where DLA Piper was a relatively late entrant via a 1993 merger with Needham & James, the aim over the past decade has been mainly to join the other national firms – Eversheds, Hammonds, Pinsent Masons and Wragge & Co – in the city’s top tier. In that time DLA Piper has thoroughly shaken up its legacy firm. Initially, it halved the workforce before rebuilding the firm in its own image and expanding again to the point where it now has 179 lawyers in Birmingham and even its rivals now speak of a “big five” in the city rather than the traditional “big four”.
Birmingham managing partner, Chris Rawstron, rates the firm’s strongest practice areas as corporate, banking, insolvency, project finance, PFI/PPP, real estate, human resources, construction, regulation and insurance. The firm enjoys a blue-chip client base of plcs, larger private companies, banks, venture capitalists, insurance companies and the UK subsidiaries of multi-nationals, sourced from both the firm’s national network and locally.
The firm claims to offer a London service at regional rates and, while it certainly likes to recruit London lawyers into the Midlands, potential recruits do not necessarily have to have a City or other national name on their CVs. In fact, of all the leading national firms, DLA Piper is the least likely to prioritise the conventional criteria applied by most law firms in favour of sterling personal qualities.
“We are looking for people with intelligence and interpersonal skills, who are highly motivated, ambitious individuals,” says Rawstron.
“We want all-round excellence.”
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