There was a time when joining a top US firm in London wasn’t considered to be the done thing for an ambitious partner at a Magic Circle UK firm.

Mike Francies, who joined Weil from Clifford Chance in 1998, was among the first wave of what is now a burgeoning group of top UK partners plying their trade at US firms in London at the peak of their careers.

“In 1996, two years before I joined, Weil was one of the first US firms to start a UK practice, with eight-12 UK partners from Magic Circle firms,” recalls Francies. “At the time, US firms tended to do US law with one or two UK people handling local law. It was seen as a bit of a retirement job for senior UK lawyers...”

Some 26 years later, Francies is indeed retiring from the firm – at the end of the month – but that is after a successful career as one of London’s top private equity and M&A lawyers as well as its longstanding London head. 

Asked why he made the move, he says: “Partly I was looking ahead and how my career would develop at Clifford Chance where at the time the established path to rise in the firm was to take on more management responsibilities, ironically something I was not very keen on. 

“I had a hopefully successful career mapped out, but you don’t often get the chance to do something different and build from the start.”

He was appointed London managing partner two years after he joined, a role he has kept ever since, although at the start of this year David Avery-Gee and Jonathan Wood became co-managing partners alongside him in preparation for his retirement.

The environment his successors will be presented with is very different from the circumstances Francies faced when he began the task of building a UK corporate practice.

“The initial challenge was that nobody had heard of you,” he says. “We had a base of US clients, but prospective clients would ask: ‘Are you sure you are doing UK law? You sound English, not American’. Before joining Weil, I thought I was good at business development, but I soon realised there was so much more to learn.” 

The key for Francies and his team, as it was for Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins and a host of other US firms, was the emergence of private equity as a global driver of M&A.

“We built on Weil’s strength in private equity, which has become a cornerstone of the firm’s global practice, as well as the firm’s restructuring brand,” he says. “The firm’s strategy was never about growing to be the biggest but about growing with our clients. That approach has served us well over the years.”

A key relationship was with the European arm of Hicks Muse – later renamed Lion Capital in London – which had strong ties in the US with Weil partners Glen West and Tom Roberts.

Francies is reluctant to highlight specific deals but recalls that “in my first two years representing them we acted on the biggest European buy-out in each of those years”.

He insists: “I tend to be proudest of the last deal I worked on, it is always good to close a deal, particularly in the current age of ever-increasing anti-trust and regulatory scrutiny.

“When I first started, there weren’t that many funds chasing deals, now everywhere you look there are new funds or specialist funds, and the clients have to be much cleverer about how they win deals. The same applies to law firms chasing funds clients, so we have to be much cleverer to win the client and then keep them.”

Francies notes that during his career the “concept of partnership has changed and there are more non-equity partners, there is much more movement between firms and in a sense, there is less mystique about the law”. But he maintains that “the essentials of the job are the same as they have always been”. 

“It is about the clients and about your people. Clients want to know if there is a problem and the next sentence they want to hear is the solution – they want the best legal advice delivered in the most effective manner.”

As for Weil’s prospects in London going forward, he notes that while “we have majored on private equity” the firm developed a broader practice, including in finance, funds and restructuring.

“More recently, we have started to invest in public M&A and what you might call boardroom work as well as anti-trust,” he adds.

A notable hire in this vein was that of leading public M&A partner Avery-Gee, who joined from Linklaters in 2019 and is now taking over from Francies with Wood, who has worked with longstanding Weil private equity partner Marco Compagnoni throughout his career.

Francies describes their move into management as “effortless” seemingly releasing “a huge amount of energy” from the London partners.

He adds: “I think next year will be the best year ever for Weil London and that is the best retirement gift I could have.”