Latham & Watkins is to close its offices in Abu Dhabi and Doha and move staff to its base in Dubai.
Latham Managing Partner Bill Voge said that the firm’s clients in the region told him that they “didn’t view having an office in Doha, when our office in Dubai is an hour’s flight away, as critical.” Especially since Dubai is only 80 miles down the road from Abu Dhabi. Presumably Voge doesn’t envisage clients back-pedaling along it like Lathams.
Latham's opened its three offices in Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi simultaneously in 2008. Two years later it launched in Riyadh. But Voge has said that a couple of years ago the firm’s management “started realising” that its seven year old strategy to launch offices across the Middle East was flawed. He said, “when we originally opened up we were confident that we had distinct markets” when in fact there was just one. An excuse that sounds about passable, especially if it had come from a hapless candidate on the Apprentice setting up his fruit stall in the wrong part of Shoreditch.
Voge insisted that this move wasn’t made from a “cost-savings standpoint” but instead noted the value of having people in a central location. And the water parks in Dubai are better.
Hogan Lovells closed its Abu Dhabi office in 2012 to make Dubai its hub
for the region. It remains to be seen whether other firms with more
than one office in the region (Allen & Overy, Ashurst, Clyde & Co, Herbert Smith
Freehills, Trowers & Hamlins et al.) also consider retreating to
Dubai.
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Latham Managing Partner Bill Voge said that the firm’s clients in the region told him that they “didn’t view having an office in Doha, when our office in Dubai is an hour’s flight away, as critical.” Especially since Dubai is only 80 miles down the road from Abu Dhabi. Presumably Voge doesn’t envisage clients back-pedaling along it like Lathams.
Latham's opened its three offices in Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi simultaneously in 2008. Two years later it launched in Riyadh. But Voge has said that a couple of years ago the firm’s management “started realising” that its seven year old strategy to launch offices across the Middle East was flawed. He said, “when we originally opened up we were confident that we had distinct markets” when in fact there was just one. An excuse that sounds about passable, especially if it had come from a hapless candidate on the Apprentice setting up his fruit stall in the wrong part of Shoreditch.
Voge insisted that this move wasn’t made from a “cost-savings standpoint” but instead noted the value of having people in a central location. And the water parks in Dubai are better.
Latham & Watkins' preferred mode of transport in the Middle East |
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Big question is when the countless firms that should also be closing in Abu Dhabi will finally follow. The market is massively overlawyered. A lot of us could name names...
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That's how business works.
The gloating tone of the headline just demonstrates how lawyers (the failed ones who write ROF news, anyway) don't understand entrepreneurship.
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