Latham & Watkins is a law firm that has been around since 1934. Latham is a giant in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and private equity, and it has offices in 14 countries. Management of the firm is spread out around the world, which lets Latham serve clients with the best-suited teams no matter where they are.
Who is Richard Trobman?
Richard Trobman is the Chair and Managing Partner of Latham & Watkins and a member of its Executive Committee. In his work, he represents investment banking firms, private equity firms, and companies in public and private offerings of securities, restructurings, bridge loans, and merger and acquisition transactions, with a focus on issuances of debt securities and leveraged transactions. Richard Trobman has worked hard with a wide range of clients, including LBO companies like Advent, BC Partners, The Carlyle Group, Cinven, EQT, PAI Partners, and Nordic Capital and investment banks like JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs.
Which Company is the Best and Why?
In last year’s Am Law 100, the elite firm was ranked as the second-highest-earning firm. Its net income also went up by almost 22%, to $2.37 billion. Even though there were more lawyers, the income per lawyer went up by 9.5%, to a little more than $1.5 million.
Do You Know About World’s Second-largest Firm by Revenue?
In 2017, Latham & Watkins was the first law firm to make more than $3 billion in sales. In 2018, the company had its best financial year in almost five years. Last year, Latham was the world’s second-largest firm by revenue. In 2018, its revenue rose by 10.5% to a new high of $3.386 billion, according to preliminary data for The American Lawyer’s annual Am Law 100 rankings. The profits per equity partner went up by 6.4% to $3.45 million, and the revenue per lawyer went up by 6% to $1.33 million.
ALM data from the past show that each of those growth rates was the highest the company has seen since 2013–2014.
How Many Lawyers in Firm in 2018?
Last year, the number of lawyers at Latham grew by 4.2% to 2,540, and the number of equity partners grew by 2.3% to 488. Richard Trobman, the firm’s chair and managing partner in London said that work done at the end of the year that didn’t result in fees by the end of the firm’s fiscal year would have put the firm on track to bill nearly $4 billion in hours for 2018.
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Why did Clients want to Work with Latham & Watkins Firm?
Richard said that a big reason for the results was that more and more clients wanted a law firm with offices in all of the world’s major cities that offered high-quality services. Trobman said that the firm’s 25 biggest clients worked with lawyers in an average of 22 of its 30 offices last year.
Richard Trobman said, “Over the course of the year, there was little to no drop in demand across the board.” “We think that one of our most important competitive advantages is that we can put together teams that work across practises, products, and locations to give our clients real value.”
Do You Know About Latham’s Financial Performance?
Last year, Latham & Watkins’s financial performance was likely to stand out, even though most people thought it was one of the best years for Big Law services in almost a decade. Citi Private Bank’s Law Firm Group said that the average revenue growth at Am Law 50 firms like Latham was 7.7 percent last year.
What is Merger Market’s Report About Latham?
Merger Market keeps track of M&A advisory work and says that the firm’s transactional department was one of the busiest in the world last year. Mergermarket said that the firm did 360 deals, and the value of those deals grew nearly 34% from the year before. This is much faster than the growth of the industry as a whole, which was 19.4%. The merger market says that the private equity practice of the firm was still one of the busiest in 2018.
Thomson Reuters said in a separate ranking of transaction values that the value of deals on which Latham advised in 2018 grew by nearly 60% year over year, which was faster than the growth of the market, which was only 19%.
Which Deals are done by Latham’s Firm?
Carlyle Group’s $11.5 billion purchase of AkzoNobel’s Specialty Chemicals business was the largest European buyout in 2018. Other important deals included advising Hong Kong-based internet provider HKBN Ltd. on its $1.34 billion purchase of WTT Holding Corp. from buyout firms MBK Partners Ltd. and TPG Capital Management and representing Energy Transfer Equity in its $62 billion purchase of Energy Transfer Partners, a natural gas pipeline company.
According to data from Bloomberg LP, Latham & Watkins’s capital markets practice represented equity and bond issuers in the most valuable deals in the world last year.
Which High-Profile Cases are Chosen by Law Firm?
The firm’s litigation practice also took on a number of high-profile cases. For example, it represented Apple Inc. in an antitrust case before the U.S. Supreme Court. It also successfully defended Janssen Biotech Inc. in a patent challenge to a blood cancer drug worth more than $2 billion a year. And, on behalf of the American Beverage Association, it beat a San Francisco-based effort to put warning labels on soda.
Do You Know Anything About the firm’s Chief Operating Officer?
Trobman and LeeAnn Black both said that 2019 had gotten off to a good start, especially when the firm’s billing schedule for the beginning of the year was taken into account. They also said that they plan to keep putting money into good lawyers. Which is something that the firm has been doing since the beginning of the year.
Even though Brexit is uncertain, Trobman said that London is a key part of the company’s global strategy. Latham firm has 425 lawyers in its London office, which is a 12 percent increase from last year. Of these, 35% work for a firm outside of the US.
Why did Latham’s Company, Hire David Beller?
In January, the company hired David Beller, a private equity and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) lawyer from New York’s Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison. Alexander Johnson, who used to be the head of the M&A practice at Hogan Lovells in Manhattan, also joined Latham.
What Happens if Company Invests in Technology?
Trobman said that if the company invests in technology now, it can not only protect itself from competition from other technology companies but it can also use new services as a competitive edge. “There’s no doubt that newcomers to the legal market or technological solutions are having a bigger impact on some parts of the market right now,” Trobman said. “But, of course, that could also have an effect on the very top of the legal market”.
