Paul Maher is a man in a hurry. A few days before Christmas, the vice chairman
of Mayer Brown, a law firm formed in 2002 by the merger of Mayer Brown &
Platt, based in Chicago, with Rowe & Maw, based in London, announced
another international marriage — this time with Johnson Stokes &
Master, one of the biggest firms in Hong Kong. In one stroke, it gave Mayer
Brown a foothold in Asia it had set out to achieve over several years. But
Maher, who personally oversaw the deal, still isn’t satisfied. “There are
still bits of the globe we’d like to be in,” he says.
The JSM merger capped an eventful year. Mayer Brown restructured
and rebranded, dropping Rowe & Maw from its name and, somewhat more
painfully, 45 lawyers from its partnership. In London, there has been an
ambitious recruiting drive, with partners lured from rivals such as Ashurst
and Barlow Lyde & Gilbert. Its impressive new offices at 201 Bishopsgate
are nearing completion. In the US, there were accusations
of professional negligence over the collapse of Refco, the futures
broker. Lately, the firm has been knee-deep in the fallout from the credit
crunch. At least life is never dull.
Maher (pronounced, fittingly, May-er) is 48, but seems younger. His
manner is informal, his light hair ever so slightly dishevelled, and he
exudes a calm, almost preternatural self-confidence. As a teenager, he kept
a poster of Che Guevara on his bedroom wall, dreamed of being a war
journalist and played guitar in a New Wave band with his younger brother,
channelling The Clash and hawking demo tapes around record companies. He
still owns a guitar but these days is more likely to be found playing
football on Saturday mornings near his home in Wandsworth Common in south
London, or watching it at Chelsea, where he holds a season ticket.
Maher made his name as a corporate finance lawyer, but now, as part of a
management troika headed by chairman James Holzhauer, in Chicago, devotes
much of his time to implementing the firm’s global strategy. It is a
position of genuine influence enjoyed by few other English lawyers at US
firms in London. (Maher resists the characterisation of Mayer Brown as an
American firm; he finds it “irritating”.)
Maher's strategy essentially amounts to: grow, grow, grow. Mayer Brown now has
more than 1,800 lawyers across the US, Europe and Asia, generating revenues
of $1,084 million last year, according to Legal Business, a trade
publication. That is equivalent to $770,000 per lawyer, less than Chicago
rivals such as Latham & Watkins and Kirkland & Ellis but more than
top-ranked English firms such as Allen & Overy and Clifford Chance. But
Maher wants to be bigger, more profitable. “We want to be one of the big
elite law firms of the world,” he says. In London alone, he is aiming for 60
to 70 per cent growth over the next three years, with billing expected to
more than double to £200 million.
Maher's determination stems from a conviction that high-value legal work will
come to be shared among a handful of huge, global full-service firms on one
hand and a few smaller, high quality specialists on the other, with the rump
of firms left in the middle eventually squeezed out.
He predicts there will be increasing consolidation as these middle-ranked
firms strive to achieve the scale they will need to survive, either by
merging or — now that the restrictions on accepting outside investment have
relaxed — raising capital on the stock market. “I’ve been saying it for a
decade and people have quite literally laughed at me,” he says, “but law
firms will float.” Asked point-blank if Mayer Brown is considering an IPO,
he fudges, but doesn’t rule it out.
Maher has not always been so single-minded. Born and raised in north London,
the son of a shipyard worker from Liverpool, he was the first person from
his family to go to university. He read law at Bristol, putting aside his
dreams of becoming a journalist, supporting himself with jobs on building
sites in the summer. After graduating, he took a job as a solicitor at a
sleepy private client practice in Mayfair, qualifying in 1984, but soon
joined the in-house legal department at ICI. There he learnt a lot about
business, he says, but it was hardly the fast-track to stardom and after
five years he felt his legal skills were beginning to soften. “I thought I’d
go and see if I could hack it back in private practice for a while,” he
says.
In 1990, Maher joined Rowe & Maw, impressed, he recalls, by the partner
who interviewed him: Charles Ashcroft, who later became general counsel at
EMI. One of the first deals he worked on was the $1 billion sale of Virgin
Records by Sir Richard Branson to EMI. He was, by his own admission, a
combative dealmaker — “No-one wants their lawyer to be a nice guy,” he says
— and was made a partner two years after joining the firm. But by the end of
the decade, he had become frustrated at Rowe & Maw, feeling it was too
rooted in its ways. The world was changing. “We knew that the business
needed to be significantly internationalised in order to survive,” he says.
In 1998, Clifford Chance offered Maher a partnership, and he accepted. It took
the then-senior partner Stuart James and a promotion to head the corporate
department to persuade him to stay with Rowe & Maw. In 2002, when James
announced he was stepping down, Maher was elected senior partner with a
mandate to shake-up the staid mid-market firm.
Before he took up the post, however, Rowe & Maw was approached by Mayer
Brown & Platt. Maher was sceptical, having already entertaining
overtures from several American firms. But he quickly discovered chemistry
with his counterparts from Chicago. The perception of cultural differences
between English and American lawyers is overblown, he says. “Frankly, things
don’t break down on cultural lines. They tend to break down on business
philosophy lines. There are those who want the fast approach to life whether
they’re in London, Germany, Washington or Houston, and those who are much
more cautious by nature.”
Cautious Maher is not. But whether he can lead Mayer Brown into the handful of
top firms in Europe, as he intends, is far from certain. Some of the
competitors he will have to step over are bigger, longer established and run
by similarly bright and determined leaders. And as those competitors are
quick to point out, achieving rapid growth in revenue and head count is one
thing; maintaining quality is quite another. Already there are whispers that
some of Maher’s American colleagues are worried he is taking them too far,
too fast. A recession is looming. Maher is unlikely to be deterred.
