Norton Rose Fulbright

Norton Rose Fulbright offers top-tier energy and banking advisory services which compete with the offerings from the Magic Circle and US-outfits, whilst maintaining a balanced and approachable culture that is perhaps more difficult to find at those competitors. To start with their practice-area expertise, Norton Rose Fulbright couples a stand-out banking and finance group with a truly exceptional energy practice (especially as regards renewables). In respect of the former, the firm excels most obviously on the basis of scale. It has over 1,000 banking and finance focused lawyers worldwide, among the top three firms in this category. Further, it is notable for the range of clients which it represents, being on the advisory panel of nearly the complete range of global financial institutions. The firm has leveraged its market-leading niches in asset finance and commodities trading to get to this point. Because it is a specialist in these areas, financial institutions with any presence in those spaces have sought to include the firm in their range of advisers. This has allowed the firm to forge the sort of relationships important to winning more generalist finance remits. Regarding the latter, Norton Rose Fulbright is consistently ranked in Band 1 across the Chambers and Partners’, Legal 500, and Times rankings in energy-related categories. The firm consistently acts on the highest-value matters in this space, particularly where they overlap with its other speciality of finance. A recent example of this is the firm’s work regarding the £2 billion development of a wind farm in Moray West, Scotland. Such is the repute of the team that they tend to retain work even where market conditions are unfavourable. For instance, when French energy conglomerate TotalEnergies sought to cut back its external law firm budget, the firm was one of the six advisers which was kept on. Further evidence of the excellence of Norton Rose Fulbright (especially in these core areas) can be found in the firm’s rapidly increasing underlying profitability. Despite some deserved skepticism in terms of the PEP figures, the much more robust profit-per-lawyer metric has also been the subject of an immense 33.1% increase over the past year alone. This is almost certainly the reflection of a significant increase in the ‘underlying profitability’ of the firm’s work. This suggests that Norton Rose Fulbright has added margin through increasing reputation for expertise. It may also be true that the synergies from the firm’s verein model may also be starting to shine through. A verein is a structure wherein different jurisdictions of a law firm retain independence from a financial perspective. They assist each-other through client referrals aided by the fluidity of having a single client-facing brand. If this is the case, the firm’s Dentons-inspired re-organisation of that verein may turbo-charge this profitability increase. Norton Rose Fulbright has thus far been able to combine this practice-area excellence with a genuinely nice and accommodating culture. Culture is notoriously difficult to pin down from the outside, but there are several concrete indica of this friendliness in the case of Norton Rose Fulbright. First, at the trainee level, all juniors are provided with a specific partner-minder to look after them throughout the duration of their training contract. Second, the opportunity for mentorship continues into the associate ranks where a substantial proportion of lawyers make use of formal mentoring programmes. Third, the firm has been a pioneer in terms of flexible working. This is true both as regards how quickly Norton Rose Fulbright adopted flexible work schemes, but also just how flexible those schemes are. The latter is evidenced in respect of the firm’s flexi-hour scheme, which guarantees onboarded associates the opportunity to work (pro rata) anywhere from 500 to 1000 billable hours per year, most of which (it seems) can be done from home. Very few firms match this level of substantive commitment to ensuring the satisfaction of their workforce.