Our work broadly divides into three categories: transactions (mergers and acquisitions/M&A), advice and litigation.
We use the law to help clients buy and sell businesses, properties and other assets, set up new and joint ventures, and merge and form consortia with others. We help them to raise finance, launch and manage investment products and reward and protect their workforce. We guide them through the regulations in jurisdictions across the world and advise them on how best to use tax incentives and manage risk. We help them assert and defend their rights, and ward off competitors when necessary. And when tough times arise, we help them wind up businesses or restructure to remain as efficient as possible.
Providing clients with this type of legal advice while anticipating possible issues before they arise, together with the very highest levels of service, requires exceptional teamwork.
Gone are the days when a transaction or advisory work involved one or two lawyers, one time zone, one law and one jurisdiction. What our clients want to do is complicated and international, involves several external advisers and often needs a team of lawyers working around the clock in different jurisdictions.
How we work
We divide our legal services work into eight practice areas:
Antitrust,
competition and trade
Corporate
- joint ventures; public and private M&A; securities
offerings
Dispute
resolution - arbitration; environment, planning and regulatory;
product risk and liability; public international law
Employment,
pension and benefits
Finance -
asset finance; banking; project finance; restructuring and
insolvency; structured finance
Intellectual
property and IT
Real
estate
Tax
We like specialists
We encourage all our lawyers to specialise in a particular industry or market. You can elect to join one of nine cross-practice industry groups. You still work within one practice area but you become a specialist in how the law affects a particular business sector.
Each practice area and each industry is supported by a team of support lawyers and business development specialists. Their task is to keep colleagues and clients up to date with new rules, regulations and market developments. The more we know about our clients' businesses, the more we are able to help them and anticipate their needs, ideally before they are aware of a potential issue themselves.