I guess it’s the same whatever industry you work in, but it’s amazing the extent to which professionals in all walks of life often assume that other countries operate on similar lines to their own national market. That is even more the case for UK lawyers’ perception of how things work in the US legal profession thanks to shared language and history between the two countries. Yet looking at the annual breakdown from Corporate Counsel of who acts for America’s largest companies, it’s striking to a UK reader the extent to which the US is, well, another country, legally speaking.
If you were to draw up a similar list in the UK it would be dominated by a small group – certainly the top 50 practices in revenue terms would cast a very long shadow. In contrast, in the larger but also much more fragmented US market there are scores of relatively small regional outfits acting for major corporations, often on substantive matters. This, as you would expect, is particularly prevalent for labour, IP and torts and negligence matters but is also evident to a certain extent for corporate and commercial issues. The Wall Street elite may have a strong (though not unchallenged) grip on banking clients, but there’s no magic circle-style monopoly at play on Main Street.
