Social & Political Savvy Help Lawyers Succeed in Nuclear 'Gold Rush'
It isn’t just legal skills that help law firms win coveted nuclear energy work.
Social and political savvy also are key abilities when mining the “nuclear gold rush” for new clients, reports the Lawyer, in an article that gives a rundown on major U.K. law firms in the practice area.
Expected construction of new nuclear facilities in Europe is creating lucrative long-term work for lawyers there, the British legal publication notes. And the U.S. nuclear energy practice area is being boosted by an expected flood of new license applications for nuclear reactors, as discussed in an earlier ABAJournal.com post.
Although skilled lawyering, of course, is required in such representations, it takes political skills to win the work in the first place, says Rupert Cowen, a partner at Hammonds in the U.K.
“At one level a nuclear project is just another project in terms of financing and return,” he tells the Lawyer. “At that level any firm with a decent capacity and a full service offering should be able to do it. The thing that’s different is the politics. It takes a certain type of individual and a certain type of firm that has spent time with individuals in government and the regulators to deal with this.”
