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Our view...
One Slaughters lawyer
says, "people at the firm love it. People outside it seem to
think it's a fate worse than death. It just goes to show what a lot of
nonsense you hear." So is the unfortunate image simply a result
of sour grapes?
You
don't get to be the most profitable firm in the City without having
something to say for yourself. The firm has the highest number of
listed clients in the City, recently acting for the likes of BOC
Group, Boots, 3i,
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and DKW. Skadden Arps, the most
profitable firm in the world, turned to Slaughters for advice on
Prudential's £17.4 billion bid for American General. Its reputation
is such that even in 2003, when the M&A market was at
rock bottom, senior partners still made more than £1million. By 2006 that
figure had risen to £1.4million.
Unsurprisingly, it has never lost a partner to another firm. Slaughters
has traditionally prided itself on breeding all-round,
black letter lawyers - give a partner a pen and he'll draft you
anything from a loan note agreement to some particulars of claim. More
store is set on serious intellect here than anywhere else in the City,
so don't even think
of applying unless you have a first class academic background (in most
cases literally). And if you do apply, don't make the mistake of
substituting the 'and' in their name for a common '&'. We've heard
your CV inevitably ends up in the bin. Of
course, when you've got that kind of image you can afford to play hard
ball. Slaughters considers marketing to be beneath it. It can't really be
bothered with foreign offices, preferring to rely on a "best
friend" alliance with local firms. Until its recent move, its London premises were some of the shabbiest in the City. Much though
it denies it, Slaughters look down on everyone, and dealing with the firm on a transaction is a different experience to dealing with anyone else.
With a handful of exceptions, Slaughters lawyers tend to be a rather
smug, bookish bunch. The firm
is also famously stingy with its equity, only appointing eight partners in
the last round, so accept that your chances of making it to the top are
somewhere between zero and sod all. Still, at least two of these were
women, so the firm finally seems to be addressing the gender imbalance
on its letterhead. And you go straight in on £700,000 a year if you
do make it... Much though
competitors like to claim that Slaughters' star is waning, there seems
to be no sign of this. In the recession Slaughters did indeed work on smaller deals
(including an MBO valued at just £350,000), and it was prepared to do
deals on fees in order to attract top clients (poaching Taylor Woodrow
from Norton Rose as a result). It is
also beginning to realise that a best friends relationship isn't the
same thing as a merger - as it found to its cost when Davis Polk turned to
Ashurst on a recent instruction.
Still, the firm is trying hard to get more referral work from Wall
Street, it used the collapse in the M&A
market as an opportunity to spend time
attracting smaller clients, and profits just keep on rising. The
work is as good as it gets, and recent pay rises mean that rewards are
better than any other Magic Circle firm with the exception of A&O.
And whilst partnership prospects
are negligible, those who don't make it can take comfort in the fact that the rest of the City will be waiting in line to offer
them equity - just look at the number of ex Slaughters people in partnerships at other top firms. So
a bit of S&M is not for everyone, but for the right sort of person
(maybe someone who took a perverse pleasure in comparing his test
results with his class mates' and was always the last to be picked for
the footie team) there's no denying that it's a class act.
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