In a demonstration of how law firms are adopting disruptive business practices, Howard Kennedy unveiled an innovative new scheme to disrupt its own business - by shutting its lawyers' computers down if they failed to complete their timesheets. Over at Cleary, reports reached RollOnFriday that it was giving vac schemers billing targets, which sounded very American. Meanwhile, a female associate at a Bell Gully away weekend experienced some unwanted disruption of her own when she woke in the night to find a partner entering her hotel room.

Two large shake-ups of the City law scene commenced in earnest in October. CMS was given the go-ahead to pick up Nabarro and flailing Olswang after partners voted overwhelmingly in favour of a CMS Nabawang merger. Round the corner, KWM's former SJ Berwin partners were hauled into a crisis meeting. And, far from such catastrophic failure, Akin Gump pegged London pay to the dollar as the pound stumbled, immediately putting its NQs on an astronomical £147k. 

All that, and a flock of 2Birds lawyers were arrested and its Hamburg office searched, while an 'equity trainee' revealed his Wall Street lifestyle in...Bristol. 




The KWM collapse continued through the winter, with partners asked for a lock-in to save the firm. They opted to shaft their underlings instead, and RollOnFriday launched an appeal to find jobs for the soon-to-be screwed over. 

It was a month of humiliated partners. An Osborne Clarke partner suffered a self-inflicted LinkedIn embarrassment, while a PI partner got basic law questions wrong in an excrutiating televised hearing. And a partner at Pennington Manches was revealed to have given £550k of a client's money to an associate he was boffing. When he was caught, he attempted to shift the blame to an innocent junior lawyer. Classy.




Come Christmastime, all eyeballs were on the inside gossip from readers, as the beans spilled about what is great at their firms, and what is absolutely dreadful. Add your two cents.

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