Why don’t more law firms merge?
The other day, we were talking to a potential client about the Olswang brand and the work we did for them prior to their merger with CMS and Nabarro back in 2017.
While it’s obviously great that their original brand still resonates many years later, it did prompt me to dig out a list of the other sizeable law firm mergers in the last decade or so to see what other notable names might have fallen through the cracks. Like me, you would be forgiven for thinking that dozens of law firm brands must have disappeared under a constant stream of law firms coupling up (or tripling up, in CMS, Nabarro and Olswang’s case), but that’s not true.
Looking at this list of major law firm mergers since 2008, aside from the recent behemoth A&O Shearman tie-up, extraordinarily, only one UK Top 100 firm has merged with another one in the last five years, when BLM (ranked at 51) teamed up with Clyde & Co in 2022. And if you choose to omit professional acquirers Knights from the list, it is even more sparse. Why’s that, then?
Leaving aside the host of financial, practical, and regulatory reasons, having spoken to literally hundreds of law firm clients about how they choose their legal advisers as part of branding or client listening exercises, it’s very clear that their decisions about the firms they choose to work with are wrapped up in cultural nuances—lawyers are understandably wary of diluting a client experience that is working just fine.
Naturally, it’s not just clients who think culture is precious. Internally, it is what holds a partnership together and what makes lawyers and their colleagues choose to join a firm and stay there. Even the relatively few firms that have vanished from the Top 100 had high levels of brand value. Look at Olswang and Nabarro for examples. Unsurprisingly so, in an industry where practitioners and their clients are so deeply embedded.
The CMS/Nabarro/Olswang tie-up is a merger that got over the line. A year or two later, we sat in a room with three firms from across Europe having a fairly awkward conversation about what they might want to call a new entity if they linked up together to create a new cross-European firm. It was such a toxic conversation that the entire plan was history the very next day—we were told that the senior team of the UK firm realised that if they couldn’t even find common ground on a name, how on earth would they find it when it came to talking about PEP or practice management systems?
That time, it seemed far more sensible to stick with the same brand that they, and their clients, knew and loved. The brand still has real value in the market, too—in fact, more than ever.
In an industry built on relationships and reputation, perhaps the real surprise isn’t how few major mergers succeed, but how many firms even consider them. When your brand represents decades of carefully cultivated client trust and the huge effort of building and maintaining an internal culture to keep people coming through the door and on side once they’re there, it isn’t just a logo or a name. It’s the embodiment of everything your clients value and your people believe in—the stakes of getting it wrong are simply too high.
It isn’t that law firm mergers can’t work—clearly, some do. But the most successful ones understand that brand integration is far more complex than deciding on which way around a portmanteau name goes and building a website. It’s about merging cultures, expectations, and decades of client relationships.
Ultimately, we know that clients really don’t choose law firms for their heft or size. They choose them for the experience, expertise, and trust that a strong brand represents. In a profession where reputation is everything, law firms do know that protecting that brand value really can matter so much more than any potential economies of scale. And the evidence suggests that their clients and people seem to agree, too.