Hi [USER=15210]@John Doe[/USER],
Really interesting thread to have started. 👨🎓
To kick things off, here are five ways of finding further information about US firms in London:
1. One useful resource (although it doesn't seem to cover some of the firms you mention) is The Legal 500 (for example, linked here is Milbank's London practice). It gives a breakdown of the types of work the firms do in their various practice groups.
2. Another place to look is Chambers & Partners. If you type in a specific firm and navigate to their UK practice, they give a rough breakdown of the type of work a particular practice group does. For example, here is Davis Polk's UK "Capital Markets: Debt & Equity" ranking.
3. If you can, speak to people with experience of the London legal market (preferably at a US firm) and ask them about (the practices of) other US firms. I found this useful and generally more senior lawyers have an informed idea of other firms acting in their practice area (at least).
4. Related to 3., although this would take some time, identifying the leading Partners at the London offices of these firms and reading their profiles (on the firm website and their LinkedIn profile) could give you an indication of the general slant of a firm's practice. Often they provide brief descriptions of the types of clients Partners work with. This is especially relevant if a firm has a very small number of partners in a particular practice area (e.g., Akin had 5 in litigation/international arbitration when I was doing my vacation scheme!).
5. I know that this point applies further down the application line, but I thought it was worth mentioning. From my experience, I found that speaking to people on my vacation schemes, particularly at Akin Gump gave me an understanding of various firms in the UK market (in certain areas), as well as just learning more about Akin itself. This goes, a little to 3., in that ultimately a great way of gaining this sort of knowledge is through speaking to people.
I hope that helps 🍾.
Tagging [USER=1]@Jaysen[/USER] here as he had some experience at Weil.
[USER=16764]@James Carrabino[/USER] had various VS experiences with US firms and is also all-round good at answering this sort of query!
