International Competition Grows Among Law Firms
As if there weren’t enough lawyers hounding Americans for business, European attorneys are now storming across the Atlantic as their firms rush to open international practices.
This is a break with tradition. Previously, European lawyers have kept a low profile in the United States.
But U.S. law firms are aggressively expanding overseas, so European lawyers find that if they want to offer a broad range of international services, they can no longer stay home.
“There is a new marketplace, an export market for lawyers around the world,” said Carol Cooper, a vice president at Martindale-Hubbell, which publishes the mammoth legal directories that are considered bibles of the profession.
Because of this explosion in international practice, she said, Martindale-Hubbell for the first time will publish a separate directory next year of foreign lawyers in the United States and American lawyers located overseas.
About 40 foreign firms with U.S. offices are listed in Martindale-Hubbell’s New York volume. Since lawyers pay to be listed, it is unclear just how many are actually here, but legal experts predict more are on the way.
In January, the Alliance of European Lawyers--a group of five of Europe’s most prestigious corporate law firms--opened a New York branch.
The alliance was formed last year in Europe to cooperate on cross-border and European Community work. The alliance calls itself an “independent approach to internationalism.”
The alliance is made up of firms from Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. All are among the biggest blue-chip companies in their countries, with a total of 550 lawyers internationally and 20 located in New York.
“It’s not so much that we want to compete with them (U.S. firms) but we feel we had to offer an alternative,” said Philippe Sarrailhe, resident partner of France’s Jeantet & Associes, one of the firms in the alliance.
“We would regard this as our natural field of practice . . . we are the Europeans, we know Europe and we think we can offer the best service about European law and law of each of the European jurisdictions,” he said.
Legal services offered by the alliance and other European firms with offices here are for the most part “outbound”--they counsel American companies on doing business overseas but do not usually practice U.S. law.
In contrast, many big U.S. firms that have opened offices in Europe not only offer “outbound” services to foreign businesses but “inbound” services as well.
David Clossey, who heads the European operations of Cleveland-based Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, said that his firm’s strategy is to hire local lawyers in its foreign offices. Jones Day has nine international offices and is the second-largest law firm in the world.
While European firms may be expanding in the United States, most have no plans of hiring U.S. partners and for the present no plans of practicing U.S. law.
Colin Potter, a New York partner at Britain’s Clifford Chance, Europe’s largest, said among the reasons is that European law firms tend to be much smaller than their U.S. counterparts and they could never hope to compete in America.
“European firms depend on U.S. firms for referrals, and this would cause this to dry up,” he said.
Sarrailhe also said the alliance has no plans for hiring U.S. partners, but he did not rule it out in the longer term.
