A human organisation even less effable than the magic circle law firm, a U.S. law firm, and particularly a senior partner in a U.S. law firm, occupies a place in the international financial services pantheon akin to a demi-god. No simple mortal dares challenge him — it is usually a him — no matter how perverse or wrong-headed his advice might be. There is one ERISA expert, for example, who has held the global financial services market hostage for twenty years because he can find no sufficiently bright lines to get him over the line on issuing an ERISA netting opinion.
The legal department of each investment bank will be captive of one U.S. law firm, who will, by parachute, drop successive general counsels into that “client”. This odd dissonance — who’s master and who servant here? — will not go unnoticed among aspiring, but passed-over, employees of that legal department, but there is little they can do. Their U.S. law firm overlords may even be invited by the current GC[1] to provide performance appraisals of those very inhouse counsel who may aspire to that venerated chair, which cements the master-slave relationship that they have managed to impose.[2]
Indeed, New York law is so baroque, so ineffable, so impervious to the efforts of outsiders to understand it that only a U.S. law firm — and only one of a certain standing — can advise on it. Those poor little minnows of the magic circle have tried for years to get a piece of this juicy market for advisory fees — by organically growing local US capacity and even merging with existing U.S. law firms to bolster credibility — but it has been, more or less, to no avail. Indeed, some U.S. firms have found to their horror that associating with an global firm headquartered elsewhere has dented their local credibility.
