With just weeks to go before stepping down as managing partner of Allen & Overy, one of the world’s largest law firms, Andrew Ballheimer was plunged into the biggest crisis the legal sector had seen since the 2008 financial crash.
The spread of coronavirus triggered an urgent shutdown of the group’s 42 global offices and a rapid shift to remote working in the midst of its first IT upgrade in 15 years.
Mr Ballheimer, 58, speaking from his North London home, where he is working alongside his wife and two of three children, says he ideally “wouldn’t have introduced a new IT system as we went into a global pandemic. But that’s what’s so destabilising about this crisis — we couldn’t have predicted it and we can’t predict its longterm impact.”
A&O’S overhaul was tested with its 5,500 staff just three days before the firm shifted entirely to remote working. He admits the process did involve “some element of stress”.
IT issues have been the least of the firm’s worries, however. The pandemic has caused a sharp decline in lucrative work on corporate deals and accelerated an already growing need for cash on the group’s balance sheet.
Although it has no long-term debt, A&O, like most law firms, runs with low cash reserves creating a rapidly worsening financial situation if clients pay late and work dries up.
“Our business needs a certain amount of cash flow and clients were having issues and saying they couldn’t pay their bills on time. We had to make sure we weren’t pushing them too hard but obviously we had to look after the business,” he says, adding a cash buffer was important as “the priority was the preservation of jobs of our people”.
It is a sudden turn in fortunes for a firm that generated a record revenue of £1.6bn last year on the back of top-tier banking work and corporate dealmaking and whose top echelon of partners took home £1.7m in profits on average.
Mr Ballheimer had intended to ask his 550 partners to stump up more capital during the summer for the first time in 11 years after its cash position had grown too thin.
Read also: Lessons for Nigerian landlords on rents in time of coronavirus crisis
Facing a slowdown in revenue, he was forced to accelerate that plan and hold back partners’ quarterly payouts as well as freezing pay reviews for less senior staff. The measures — echoed across the sector — were discussed with senior partner Wim Dejonghe and the finance team over the weekend on March 14 before being approved and communicated to partners on March 26 on a conference call.
“Partners were asking why we had gone first [taking action before other firms]. But we presented an analysis of the issue, we said we needed a cash buffer.”
Handling the fallout of coronavirus followed a difficult 18 months of high-stakes and ultimately unsuccessful merger negotiations with US law firm O’melveny & Myers, which collapsed last summer.
Conquering the US market has become a pressing need for the elite cadre of UK firms known as the “magic circle”, who work on the City’s most lucrative deals but have lost ground in recent years to aggressive US legal groups moving in on their territory.
Firms such as the Los Angeles-founded Latham & Watkins — the largest in the world by revenue — have surfed a decadelong private equity boom driven by US fund houses and benefited from links to the US investment banks financing the world’s largest deals. Such firms have lured partners with generous pay deals, such as the $10m a year package Kirkland & Ellis paid for Freshfields private equity specialist David Higgins in 2017.
A&O saw an opportunity to leapfrog its magic circle rivals overseas by tying up with West Coast law firm O’melveny & Myers to create a group with more than £2bn in combined revenue. Until that point, A&O’S efforts to expand in the US had revolved around hiring big-hitting partners, including a leveraged finance team led by White & Case partner Scott Zemser in 2016 and three finance partners from Paul Hastings the year after that.
The hires involved breaking the firm’s sacred “lockstep” remuneration structure, in which partner pay is tied to seniority, unlike the more aggressive “eat what you kill” model prevalent in the US. But highly paid partners can be lured away, making a more sustainable strategy vital.
“[The merger] was a chance to accelerate away from our competition,” says Mr Ballheimer. “A&O is the magic circle and the global elite, but we want to be part of the global elite who are equally at home in English and US law,” he says. “The States is half of the world’s legal industry and we are much smaller there than we are here so we had to build it out.”
Discussions proved knotty and time-intensive, not least because the two groups were pushing for a fully integrated firm at the time the merger closed. Others have opted instead for a Swiss verein structure, meaning merging entities remain separate after the deal is done.
“That was ambitious and it also meant that detailed discussions took a long time, as each side tried to better understand what the combined firm would look like,” says Mr Ballheimer. His “pragmatic and insightful” wife was on hand to give counsel, while partners helped him draft 550 written answers to questions posed internally.
“People were anxious about the loss of identity but O’melveny had the same [concern]. We were each proud of our culture and anxious about losing our heritage.”
By summer 2019, partners were on board and the deal was on the brink of going ahead. But at the last moment, sterling moved sharply against the dollar, throwing the merger into disarray.
“We ultimately reached agreement on all [the] issues but then FX and interest rates moved against the deal,” he says. “The strengthening of the dollar against the pound impacted valuation and interest rate cuts in the US affected pension costs on their side. That meant that we couldn’t agree a financial deal that both sides could support.”
Mr Ballheimer was in Spain with his family when the dream died. “Wim called me as I was having a cup of tea on our terrace and said, ‘This doesn’t look good, does it?’ and I said, ‘No, I think it’s over.”
Lawyers often claim that the longer a merger process takes, the more unlikely it becomes. Mr Ballheimer concedes that time “becomes a real challenge in pulling off a merger of this complexity, but resolving complex issues of detail of course takes time. So it’s a bit of a Catch-22.”
“If we could have got to a deal more quickly, I think it would have helped,” he says.
Mr Ballheimer would have remained in post for at least three more years if the merger had completed. Instead he will leave to advise companies coping with crisis situations. His six-month transition period at A&O is likely going to be as good a primer as any.
Three questions for Andrew Ballheimer
Who is your leadership hero? I am a bit of a history buff and one of my “heroes” is George Marshall (the US general who was army chief of staff in the second world war and then US secretary of state). He led by example in a quiet but clear manner, always with integrity and never about himself, always about the greater good. Two examples of this were his declining the field leadership (and glory) for the D-day landings in 1944 and his advocacy of what became the Marshall Plan in 1947 (to rebuild Europe).
If you were not a Ceo/leader, what would you be?
In my dreams, a professional tennis player. My parents arrived in the UK in 1939 from Nazi Germany and they were keen on me being a lawyer, an accountant or a doctor. I pass out at the sight of blood though so that was off the cards, and I thought law was more interesting than being an accountant. Thirty three years on, I’m still here.
What was the first leadership lesson you learnt?
My first job was working at Mcdonald’s flipping burgers. My boss there led by example and always worked at least as hard as anybody else and nothing was beneath him.
Unfettered globalisation is over. That is not a controversial statement at this point for obvious reasons, from the post-covid-19 retrenchment of complex international supply chains to the decoupling of the US and China. It’s hard to imagine a reset to the 1990s neoliberal mindset, even if Joe Biden wins the US presidential elections, or if the EU experiences a moment of renewed cohesion in response to the pandemic.
The world is more likely to become tripolar — or at least bipolar — with more regionalisation in trade, migration and even capital flows in the future. There are all sorts of reasons for this, some disturbing (rising nationalism) and others benign (a desire for more resilient and inclusive local economies).
That begs a question that has been seen as controversial — are we entering a postdollar world? It might seem a straw-man question, given that more than 60 per cent of the world’s currency reserves are in dollars, which are also used for the vast majority of global commerce. The US Federal Reserve’s recent bolstering of dollar markets outside of the US, as a response to the coronavirus crisis, has given a further boost to global dollar dominance.
As a result, many people would repeat the mantra that in this, as in so many things, “you can’t fight the Fed”. The dominance of the US banking system and dollar liquidity, both of which are backstopped by the Fed, will give the American dollar unquestioned supremacy in the global financial system and capital markets indefinitely.
Others argue that “you can’t replace something with nothing”. By this they mean that even though China, Russia and other emerging market countries ( as well as some rich nations such as Germany) would love to move away from dollar dominance, they have no real alternatives. This desire is especially sharp in a world of increasingly weaponised finance. Consider recent moves by both Beijing and Washington to curb private sector involvement in each other’s capital markets. Yet, the euro, which represents about 20 per cent of global reserves, can’t compare in terms of liquidity and there are still big questions about the future of the eurozone. The gold market is far too tight, as evidenced by the fact that it is now virtually impossible to buy the physical metal.
But there are economic statistics, and then there is politics. It’s telling that China has been a big buyer of gold recently, as a hedge against the value of its dollar holdings. It is also testing its own digital currency regime, the e- RMB, becoming the first sovereign nation to roll out a central bank-backed cryptocurrency. One can imagine that would be easy to deploy throughout the orbit of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, as an attractive alternative for countries and businesses that want to trade with one another without having to use dollars to hedge exchange-rate risk.
This alone should not pose a challenge to the supremacy of the greenback, although it was enough to prompt former US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, a man who does not comment lightly, to write a recent essay surveying the future of the dollar. But it isn’t happening in a vacuum.
The European Commission’s plan to bolster its recovery budget for Covid-19 bailouts by issuing debt that will be repaid by Eu-wide taxes could become the basis of a true fiscal union and, ultimately, a United States of Europe. If it does, then I can imagine a lot more people might want to hold more euros.
I can also imagine a continued weakening of ties between the US and Saudi Arabia, which might in turn undermine the dollar. Among the many reasons for central banks and global investors to hold US dollars, a key one is that oil is priced in dollars. Continuing Saudi actions to undermine US shale put a rift in the relationship between the administration of US president Donald Trump and Riyadh. It is unlikely that a future President Biden, who would probably follow Barack Obama’s pro- Iran stance, would repair it.
Even with oil prices this low, Dallas Fed president Robert Kaplan recently told me that energy independence remains “strategically important” to the US and that “there will still be a substantial production of shale in the US in the future”. Who will fill the Saudi void, then? Very probably China, which will want oil to be priced in renminbi. A decoupling world may be one that requires fewer dollars.
Finally, there are questions about the way in which the Fed’s unofficial backstopping of US government spending in the wake of the pandemic has politicised the money supply. The issue here isn’t really a risk of Weimar Republic-style inflation, at least not any time soon. It’s more about trust. Some people will argue that the dollar is a global currency and that its fortunes do not really depend on perceptions of the US itself. Certainly, events of the past few years would support that view.
But there may be a limit to that disconnection. The US can get away with quite a lot economically as long it remains politically credible, but less so if it isn’t. As economist and venture capitalist Bill Janeway recently told me: “The American economy hit bottom in the winter of 1932-3 after [Herbert] Hoover lost all credibility in responding to the Depression and trust in the banks vanished with trust in the government.”
It could be that one day, trust in the dollar and trust in America will reconverge.
