Guiding our way to growth

Private capital is our core strength as a Firm, and due to constant volatility in recent years, private capital has become increasingly vital to the global economy. We know from conversations with our clients that today’s private investors are active, inquisitive, often serial entrepreneurs with wide-ranging and complex challenges. They have sought professionalised structures and global diversification due to uncertainty caused by the after-effects of the pandemic as well as ongoing geopolitical and macroeconomic instability. Often they have built their success on deep and specific expertise in one particular sector or region and need advice on expanding their interests. Increasingly, they are focused on sustainability and leading with purpose. Against this backdrop, we have an essential role to play as trusted guides, sitting alongside them at critical moments and delivering expertise that spans myriad geographies, cultures, jurisdictions and issues. A guide that scans the horizon and combines a global perspective and deep local expertise with a wider professional ecosystem, able to connect them with who and what they need to flourish. The launch of our Private Office – which you can read more about in the pages that follow – supports this client-centric ambition and will attract a whole new generation of private capital clients to the Firm who value these broad, collaborative conversations across sectors and territories. We have refreshed and reinforced the way we express our strategy and values externally through a relaunch of our visual identity, our website and our client-facing materials. These changes underline our purpose to have a meaningful impact on individuals, their families and businesses and to offer legal services across a broad range of integrated advisory, transactional and contentious services. It is part of our wider strategy to be the best international law firm for our clients’ private capital needs. That means combining our broad legal skills and sector and industry expertise with a global footprint that ensures we are present wherever our clients need us. Our team based in Paris is a testament to this and in September 2023, we celebrated an impressive decade for the office, which has grown the partnership, welcomed new practices, and won awards and recognition from peers and clients alike. You can read on to see how we are strengthening our footprint in Southeast Asia through the opening of an office in Singapore to provide our private capital clients with the best possible service, joined up across international wealth and dispute resolution centres. The past 12 months have also seen us welcome 12 lateral hire partners in our Commercial, Construction, Dispute Resolution, Family, Real Estate and Tax practices to enhance and strengthen our offer to clients. As the speed of change in global markets accelerates, we will need to explore innovative technologies to future-proof our business. But what our clients value isn’t defined by scale or technology – it’s about our people. We draw strength from our differences and our unique mixture of commercial and private client work. We seek out people with the emotional intelligence and cultural sensitivity to build long-term relationships and also the breadth of thinking to look ahead, listen, ask the right questions and offer solutions before the problem arises. To meet – and exceed – our clients’ expectations and needs, we focus on guiding them to growth at critical moments in their personal and business lives. We hope you enjoy reading this 2023 Review and as always, we welcome your feedback.