Dentons

In 2010, DWS merged with Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal to create SNR Denton. Or SNRD, as we liked to call it - like you're attempting to hack up a furball. Then in 2013 it gobbled up Salans and Canadian firm Fraser Milner Casgrain, and emerged as a beautiful butterfly called Dentons.

There's a history of slightly incongruous mergers here, too. Denton Hall's 2000 merger with Wilde Sapte was always going to be a marriage of unlikely bedfellows. Denton Hall was a respected media outfit, whereas Wilde Sapte specialised in banking and finance. But in the past decade the firm has tried hard to establish itself as a serious City player. Rumour has it that when it opened new offices on Chancery Lane the powers that be opened up a back entrance just so they could technically say that it was a City firm.
 
In 2014 it opened in Cape Town, Casablanca, Houston and Astana in glamorous Kazakhstan. And in 2015 the firm became the biggest law firm in the world when it merged with Dacheng in China and McKenna Long & Aldridge in the US to create a behemoth.
 
There's some very good stuff at the gargantuan firm. The firm’s energy and project finance reputation is very healthy, its banking and finance groups are performing more than respectably and pre credit crunch its real estate group was going great guns. More importantly in today’s climate, the firm can challenge the Magic Circle when it comes to asset finance, restructuring and insolvency instructions.

In mid-2020, prompted by Covid, it shuttered its Aberdeen and Watford offices.

The atmosphere at Dentons seems to be quite positive.

In the RollOnFriday Firm of the Year Survey the firm was praised for being "very open door and non hierarchical" with "good working arrangements for working parents".  It was also reported that "Teams get on well together" and assistants should bear in mind that the firm has made up more partners than pretty much anyone else in recent years. However, some lawyers criticised a confused identity and "bad communication" from management, and there were also mutterings about penny-pinching to control costs. Or, as one solicitor put it, "as tight as a trout's arse in water". Staff seemed to be happy with the "City-standard" work, but with a culture that allows for "more breaks in-between big jobs than you might get in the magic circle boiler rooms". Some lawyers were also impressed that the recent expansion had resulted in "refreshingly little by way of American nonsense" and that whilst "some people may dislike global domination" at least the firm could "point to a fairly coherent strategy".

One staffer was just pleased that "our business cards have our names written in Chinese on the back". However, being part of the behemoth does have its downsides as one lawyer complained that "we merge so often I genuinely have no idea where we have offices" whilst another bemoaned that the market might not appreciate the strategy of "growth for the sake of growth".  

Lawyers were mostly positive on promotion chances. The firm, said one lawyer, "appears to operate on a one out, one in policy when it comes to partners, causing the firm's hierarchical structure to look less like a pyramid and more like the big square building in Washington" from which its leaders "plot world domination". But another senior said the firm "will promote depending on talent rather than PQE", adding, "I have found them to be very good at progressing women into leadership and generally committed to diversity" and assuring us that there's "lots of potential and opportunity for committed lawyers". Career progression, said a colleague, "is set out in detail with clear steps on how to achieve it".

Training was almost universally praised. "The work is varied and challenging and there is a genuine commitment to supporting professional development", said a senior lawyer. A trainee said it was "absolutely excellent", and they weren't alone.

The London office building lets itself down though. It "looks like an incomplete game on Jenga on the outside" and "everything on the inside is peeling (paint, floors) or broken (air conditioning, lights, doors)", said a respondent. Fix it, they beg, "so long as it doesn't allow management to enact plans for firm-wide open plan working". Others agreed that the City offices needed "deep cleaning and decorating". They "won an award for 'Best Building' in 1995", said one of the lawyers within them, "and don't appear to have had an upgrade since".  

Some flak for the regional office: the salaries "are substantially less than those in the London office, despite the regional offices regularly billing more and working longer hours", claimed one of its worker bees.  So "the salaries in the London office are pretty good, but if you're in Watford (18 mins from central London), expect to lose on average a grand a minute for each minute you are out of London". Though the Milton Keynes office "is nice". 

As for work/life balance, in the majority of departments it is, said a solicitor "incredible - which means salaries get an excellent rating". Although they conceded "our banking teams are likely to disagree". 

On the downside, there's "no firm-wide Xmas party, just departmental", but on the upside it "feels like a firm in the early stages of reinvigorating its UK efforts and promising to be much improved in 3-5 years". Communication is "quite open and management are always updating staff on their strategy and plans". Which, so far, appears to be: take over eeever-reee-thiiing.

NB salaries listed are for London - they are less in the regions where first year trainees are on £28,500, second years £30k and NQs £40k.

Offices

HQ
London
UK Offices
Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Milton Keynes
Non-UK Offices
Canada (Calgary, Edmonton, Montréal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver), United States (Albany, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Hilo, Honolulu, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Orange County, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco/Oakland, Short Hills, Silicon Valley, St. Louis, Tysons, Washington DC), Latin America and the Caribbean (Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Bogotá, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Guanacaste, Guatemala City, Guyana, Jamaica, Lima, Mexico City, Monterrey, Montserrat, Panama City, San José, San Salvador, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and The Grenadines), Europe (Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt, Luxembourg, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Paris Rome), Central and Eastern Europe (Bratislava, Bucharest, Budapest, Istanbul, Prague, Warsaw), Russia and the Caucasus (Kyiv, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tbilisi), Africa (Cairo, Cape Town, Casablanca, Johannesburg), Middle East (Abu Dhabi, Doha, Dubai, Muscat), Central Asia (Almaty, Astana, Baku, Tashkent), China (Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, plus 42 more), Singapore, Asia Pacific (Port Moresby, Seoul, Ulaanbaatar, Yangon), Australia (Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney)

Salary

1st Year Trainee
£40,000
2nd Year Trainee
£44,000
NQ
£70,000
1 PQE
-
2 PQE
£77,000
3 PQE
£85,000
Profit Per Equity Partner
£651,000

Benefits

Target Hours
1600
Allowance
25/26
Bonus
Yes
Gender Pay Gap
-
Health Care
Yes
Flexible Working
-
Maternity & Paternity Policy
Enhanced maternity pay

Trainees

Latest Trainee Retention Rate
68%
Training contracts per year
-

RollOnFriday Best Law Firms to Work At: Dentons’s scores

Overall
50%
Pay
49%
Career Development
54%
Management
45%
Culture
52%
Work/Life Balance
52%

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