Mayer Brown Discusses Merger with British Law Firm
Trans-Atlantic mergers between law firms appear to be all the rage.
The latest firms said to be in merger talks are Mayer Brown and U.K.-based law firm Simmons & Simmons.
Management teams from the law firms held merger talks last week “in a secret off-site location,” the Lawyer reports. Simmons partners were informed of the “preliminary discussions” in an e-mail on Thursday evening, Legal Week says.
A merged firm would have 2,400 lawyers in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the Lawyer says. A merger, however, could lead to “a slew of departures,” the publication says, relying on an unnamed source.
News of the merger talks comes after the merger of Hogan & Hartson and Lovells, and approval of a merger between Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal and Denton Wilde Sapte.
Tony Williams of Jomati Consultants told the Lawyer that the latest merger discussions are “a continuation of a trend we’ve seen over the past nine months, and it puts pressure on other firms to seriously look at their options.”
