Merger a triumph of project management

There was never any doubt that the partners at Allen & Overy and Shearman & Sterling would agree to the merger. The question was what their level of enthusiasm would be for combining two firms of such long and storied heritage.

It says a lot that more than 99% of ballots cast gave it the thumbs-up, clearing the way for what’s been heralded as the first fully integrated global elite law firm.

Mergers by their nature are difficult, especially in professional services. “We’re a people business,” says Andrew Trahair, who was part of the leadership team presenting the deal to partners. “This was about melding cultures and bringing colleagues together.”

It helped to have “a great starting point”, he says: both were elite firms of long standing; they were largely compatible and enjoyed balanced brand recognition. Andrew, an A&O partner of more than 25 years, took on a key role to get from announcement to the vote almost immediately after the agreement was signed, and became the global head of merger integration for A&O Shearman. “What A&O represented in the U.K., Europe and global markets, Shearman brought to the table in terms of the U.S. market, especially in financial services and corporate law.”

But still, Andrew says, “like any democratic process, you never know until the votes are in and counted.”

Getting to the vote

Project management (PM), though long established in manufacturing industries, was a recent addition to the A&O toolkit—an innovation of former senior partner Wim Dejonghe. He saw it working well for clients and asked Rani Oliver to set up a legal PM office for the firm.

That was in 2015. Little could the first small team have foreseen that, ten years later, its members would be applying their skills to their own firm. “We found it exciting,” says Rani. That and slightly nerve-wracking."

As executive director of the global PM team, part of A&O Shearman’s Advanced Delivery & Solutions, Rani was instrumental in coordinating a massive effort that ultimately involved 86 people from around the businesses. She started assembling her PM merger team shortly after the merger was announced on May 21, 2023, and began attaching individuals to the many workstreams.

The PM merger team was instrumental in making sure the workstreams moved along at the right pace through due diligence, publishing the information circular to partners, organizing the roadshow and getting to an important milestone, the partner vote in October 2023, which would approve the deal struck by senior management.

Rani and the PM merger team were able to draw on expertise from within the firms as well as external advisors specializing in tax, brand and communications.

Fortunately, they had a running start, having worked on prior merger discussions. “We’d learned so much already,” says Rani. “We knew how to structure ourselves; as a team we knew each other well and worked together well.”

Robyn Brownlie-Stubbs, global co-head of PM, agrees: “A lot of planning had already been done from A&O’s perspective, and Shearman’s as well. This was essential to standing it up as quickly as we did.”

Helen Lightfoot joined the PM merger team immediately after the announcement, becoming a bridge between substance and process. She was an obvious choice: she is a lawyer and was part of the PM team before becoming head of innovation for global disputes in 2022. Her role included partner engagement and communications. “It was key to getting everyone’s buy-in,” she says.

One of her jobs was setting up a process for queries on antitrust guidelines which had to be followed pre-May 1, including updating the Q&A document at each significant stage. “There were quite a few of us involved. The firms were separate entities at the time. We were making sure everyone knew what they could and couldn’t talk about, even internally.”

Adarsh Chhabria also joined the PM merger team shortly after the announcement to help with writing the circular. A senior associate in the global private equity group, he remembers it as “all a bit of a blur—quite an intense process.”

Working with Andrew Trahair, Adarsh’s job involved identifying how the merger would affect the firm and individuals and working backward, “almost reverse engineering [the circular] by pre-empting questions partners were likely to raise,” he says.

The hardest thing about the exercise was maintaining consistency of information across two documents, one for each legacy firm. “We needed to make sure we were happy with what went into theirs and they needed to be happy with what went into ours.”

It was an eye-opener to him just how much went on behind the scenes. “We had calls with comms, marketing, technology, senior management, everyone thinking about the circular from different perspectives. Every change had an impact somewhere else, so the document needed constant checking.” 

Andrew, as part of the roadshow team, sensed the extremely positive mood of partners, who, he says “wanted the opportunity to ask questions and express their views and opinions,” while remaining “realistic” about what it takes to deliver a complicated transaction like the merger. It was important, he notes, to have a forum for open, honest, thoughtful and constructive conversations.

In the U.S., chief of staff Chris Arnold had been part of the small team of senior leaders involved in the transaction and related internal communications on the Shearman side of the merger. In a matter of just weeks, he says, the merger was agreed, and communicated to colleagues, clients and the global legal market with immediate brand recognition as A&O Shearman in a way that “brought it to life from the very beginning.”

Helen saw that effect first-hand at the London, Washington and New York roadshows. She says: “It was exciting to see [partners’] views and questions outside of all the immediate project teams considerations.”

When the vote results were announced, she adds, the near-universal approval “made it feel like all the hard work had been worthwhile.”

After the vote

The work on integration officially started the moment the partners’ vote was announced; unofficially the PM team, together with the business teams’ directors (Andrew Brammer, Bethan Chatters, Sasha Hardman and Michael Michaelides) had already been laying the groundwork, teeing up internal resources and external advisors. The Big Four and other consultancies, for example, “do integration all the time,” says Rani. “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel.” 

Andrew saw his role expand to include leading implementation of the merger. He describes it as “helping different pieces of the new firm to come together, to maximise opportunities and synergies, to ensure it delivered the efficiencies planned as part of the merger—in general helping achieve the vison and strategy of the new combined firm.”

The six months leading up to merger day on May 1 was a period of intense work and incremental wins. “People maybe don’t realise there were so many milestones along the way,” says David Bothwell, an associate in Advanced Delivery Legal, based in Belfast. “A lot of people deserve a huge amount of credit for keeping everything going.”

David automated the production of powers of attorney for hundreds of legacy A&O partners. It was a challenge, he recalls, chasing some of the more senior people for replies or signatures. This led one partner to jokingly refer to him as ‘the DocuSign spambot.' Far from being offended, David says he “wore it as a badge of honour.”

As Chris put it: “A merger of this scale and complexity required enormous project management support and commitment from firm leadership and our business professionals throughout the year between the announcement and closing of the merger.” The project management efforts, supported by important contributions from members of both A&O and Shearman, were “instrumental” at all stages of the process. 

Senior legal project manager Louise Fisher led a workstream managing and communicating changes that colleagues were going to see in their day-to-day activities. Leading up to Day one, she had access to feedback from partners of both legacy firms who sat on advisory committees set up to act as a sounding board for the communication of changes. It was “interesting to hear their views first-hand,” she says. 

Louise enjoyed working with a lot of senior business people she might otherwise not have met. A former lawyer who joined A&O as a trainee in 2008, she was fascinated to “see how a law firm operates from behind the scenes.”

Others involved agreed it was a great experience, showcasing the breadth and depth of talent across the new firm. “I’m very proud that I played a tiny part in a transformational moment in the firm’s history,” says David.

Andrew adds: “Seeing the large and highly talented teams of the soon-to-be-combined firm going above and beyond and seeing it go live was as exciting as it gets.”

“It really was a huge effort,” says Rani. “We probably have the industry-best leaders of business teams.”

Brand new look and feel

It’s a wonder any work happened on Wednesday, May 1, such was the sense of excitement at offices around the world. In London’s Bishops Square office, there was a remarkable transformation overnight, affecting both major and minor aspects of the office environment. New signage was installed, and the cash registers in our restaurants displayed the new logo. “Even the water bottles in our meeting rooms were branded with our new identity,” one colleague observes.

Chris Arnold had a similar experience in New York. Walking into the building on May 1 and seeing the new A&O Shearman branding was “a special milestone—a proud moment after all the hard work and contributions from people of both legacy firms.”

In every office, out went the old A&O red and Shearman blue; in came the new look and feel dominated by the A&O Shearman green. Ditto the firm’s online environment, which welcomed colleagues and visitors with a fresh and vibrant user experience.

LinkedIn was “flooded with green” as colleagues celebrated the change, enthusiastically posting updates and photos from their locations. 

London-based senior brand project manager Ali O’Hara, managing the brand workstream, should have been sitting back to enjoy watching everything unfold. To an extent he was. Some jobs remained after May 1, but his 20-plus years of experience in project management had taught him to “concentrate on what you can fix.”

Six months earlier, that had meant looking at the bigger picture while each of the 49 office managers carried out a local audit on everything from signage and décor down to the smallest detail that was branded in legacy red or blue, costed its replacement, submitted a budget, and when that was signed off, “got on with it.”

Despite risk mitigation, there were hiccups. In some jurisdictions, changes couldn’t be made on May 1 while permission to do so was pending. Elsewhere, supply chain delays held up progress.

Even with something as apparently simple as business cards, “you’re effectively merging two processes into one new global process, and that’s not always easy,” says Ali.

To prevent a deluge on Day one, and to make sure senior people had new brand materials, some work had to be completed in advance. This included brochure conversion in March, along with some social media work, leaving April for current material with content that needed to be updated. 

“We had to draw a line somewhere,” says Ali, “so we made it midnight on April 30. A lot of system changes took place then.” The new PowerPoint template, for example, was accessible at one minute past midnight local time on May 1 around the world.

“At Bishops Square, it was obvious everything could not be done overnight, so some changes were carried out the weekend before May 1, leaving the teams to swap out items that clients would notice. It was important that our people noticed change too and it was a huge team effort early on that Wednesday to put branded merchandise on everyone’s desk.”

Feedback on Day one was positive and a high point for Ali. “When something lands well with clients, that ticks a box,” he says. “People were moved by the distinctiveness and slickness of the new identity. When you walk in and see the [brand] features, it feels good to have been a part of it—part of a project that brings feeling and emotion out of people.”

Introducing the project management team

Project management was a new concept for law firms when it was introduced to A&O in 2015. A&O had just won a huge mandate, the size, scale and complexity of which convinced Wim Dejonghe that there was a need.

Rani Oliver came to the task with ten years’ experience in the IT industry, which included leading A&O’s global IT operations. She had also gained a unique insight into the firm from working as Wim’s executive advisor for 18 months. When setting up the PM team, she started small—“me, a person from finance and IT”—and set about building what she later called a “coalition of the willing,” partners who embraced legal project management and could promote the benefits to other partners.

Today Rani leads a global team of 25. While the core role of the PM team remains to manage complex matters, it’s no longer the case that it works on only the largest. “It can be something that’s just highly process-driven or complex, involving many moving parts,” Rani says.

Many members of the team are legal professionals—a far cry from the PM team’s origins in 2015 when “at the beginning lawyers didn’t immediately understand what we did and how we could add value."

“Now roughly half the team are lawyers, with the other half experienced project managers. What’s nice is that the role has been professionalized. Now it’s seen as an alternative career path for lawyers.”

Robyn Brownlie-Stubbs became the fifth member of the PM team, joining from the Disputes practice. She uses the analogy of a spider’s web to describe the role of PM: “If you think of the deal as a web, the project manager is the spider pulling it all together.

“Typically, at the senior project management level we take workload off a senior associate or partner.” This relieves specialists of tasks such as tracking the workstreams, communicating with the client, monitoring finance, watching for scope creep and more.

In just ten years, the PM team has become so well-established that it’s now an expected part of many matters, including complex firm-wide projects such as the merger. 

Read more about the work of our PM team