Sidley executive committee chair Brian Fahrney on London, talent and the global elite

Welcome back to the podcast. My guest today is Brian Farney, chair of Siddly Austin's executive committee. If you haven't noticed, Siddly has built one of the fastest growing US law and platforms in London over the past 10 years or so, transforming itself from a relatively specialized finance practice into a major player in private equity funds and leverage finance. We talk about how that strategy came together, why London has become such an important part of Siddly's global platform, the growing importance of the so-called New York London corridor for top firms, and where the Brian takes much notice of the battle to be part of Big Law's global elite. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Thank you to LaGoura for sponsoring the numberable podcast. LaGoura is the agentic operating system for legal work, supporting lawyers in research, review, and drafting across complex matters. With the launch of LaGoura AOS, its agent now drives legal execution end-to-end, handling the work from start to finish, while lawyers retain oversight and make the decisions that matter. Trusted by more than 1200 leading law firms and in-house teams across more than 50 markets, LaGoura is setting the standard for how great legal work gets done. You can find out more at laGoura.com. So look, I wanted to start then, Brian, and maybe you could tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming chair of the executive committee at Siddly Austin. Sure. Well, let me start Oliver by thanking you for having us on your podcast here. I know you have followed the firm, covered it closely, especially in London, and we're very grateful for that. And I'm really glad to be here to chat with you. So I'm a Siddly lifer. I've been at the firm since 1992, not to date myself, but I guess I will. And it was particularly gratifying for me to be elected as the chair of the executive committee last year. I joined right out of law school, Northwestern Law School, here in my hometown of Chicago. And I started in the restructuring group. And after a couple of years, I realized I was not cut out to be a restructuring lawyer. And I was grateful to be able to make the change over to the M&A side. And really cut my teeth on M&A in the late '90s and early 2000s. And had some success in that area. And ultimately ran our M&A practice globally for about six years and have been on our firms management committee for the last five and a half years. And so I guess I would say I've had a front row seat for much of the change that's gone on in the legal industry of late. And I'm happy to talk about that today. - So you made that shift quite early in your career then from restructuring over to M&A. I mean, it's often said in relation to kind of the American system versus the UK or European system that it's kind of less siloed or it was historically in the US. You know, and you had a sort of finance lawyers in the US historically seem to have been able to turn their hands to all aspects of finance. Is that broadly true? - I think when I started, which again, this is back when dinosaurs roam the earth all over you got to recall, it was more that way. Very much a general list sensibility and way of practicing or certainly more so than today. I think over time in the US, in London elsewhere, it certainly has become more specialized as the world's grown more complicated. But certainly back in the day, it was easier to transfer as between groups and to operate in different fields of law. I would say it's definitely become a bit more specialized in the modern era. - So you took over as chair last last year, 2025, Brian. Is there anything that's sort of surprised you most since taking the position? - No, I had been spending a lot of time doing a lot of the things that I do today. So I can't say that the day to day job has changed all that much. And I honestly can't say that there have been surprises. I would say that the pace of change in the legal profession is probably accelerating. We're gonna talk about that in a little bit, I'm sure. But I would say that there weren't any surprises. I knew what I was signing up for and just proven to be true. - Sounds like someone was prepared for the position. - So it talked to me then a little bit about some of the challenges of running a global law firm like Sid Leoste. What do you feel like the hardest things to get right? - I think about it as how do I spend, where do we spend the most time? Because that tends to suggest the answer to your question, which is what are your priorities and what do you need to do to get it right? And the single biggest driver of it all is attracting and retaining talent. And so we spend a lot of time thinking about that, working with our lawyers, providing them with opportunities, thinking about where the hiring of lateral partners will help our business thinking about how we make the lawyers who are here better, how we give them more opportunities and a better platform to grow their practices. And that's really probably the biggest portion of the job, frankly, and it's not surprising because it's a talent business. And if you have exceptional talent, a lot of this takes care of itself, but in order to cultivate talent at a high level and to find it and retain it, you need to spend a lot of time on that. - So that's a mix, then, of internally talking to your people, but also speaking to potential sort of new recruits in the market as much as you can. Is that what it looks like? - It is, but it's a lot of the same discussion. It's what is the firm and its platform and bringing the resources of the firm to bear going to do for your clients, for your practice. It's really the same discussion. And in one case, you're explaining that to somebody from outside the firm and hoping that they'll join you. And in another case, you're explaining it to the people who are already at the firm and just helping them get better and better at what they do. But it's really a lot of the same discussion. - And it's probably a silly question given your answer just there, Brian. But how important is talent to a law firm like Sidley? - It's critical. I mean, clients demand the best talent. That's how you get the job done. That's how you grow client relationships. That's how you attract new clients. So it's critical and we think, as I said, we think about it constantly. And that's how, if that and I spend an awful lot of our time is, I guess you could call it talent management, you could call it talent. Attraction, retention, whatever you want to call it, but it's all about talent. The other thing I would say is, you know, as part of that, continuing to be a good steward of the culture. So we've got a terrific culture at our firm. It requires care and feeding all the time in order to maintain it. Because just having it doesn't mean you're always going to have it. Having it means you have an opportunity to cultivate it, maintain it. And spread it. And so we spend a lot of time, you know, we're uniquely in a position as a leader of the firm to help set a good example for others and to continue to, you know, inco-kate the partnership and the firm at large with all the values that go into our culture. And it is a competitive strength for us. I mean, when people come into the firm, they recognize that it's a good culture and they really appreciate it. And they almost always will comment on it after the fact, gee, I knew you guys had a good culture. I didn't realize how good it is, it's fantastic. And it's an important part of the job and you spend a lot of time doing things that I would say go to advancing and maintaining that culture. - Well, what does that look like in practice then? Because, you know, every law firm talks up their culture, right? And sometimes it's difficult to kind of get under the herd and get a sense of what that actually looks like within a law firm. But for you guys, what does kind of good culture look like? - I think it's fundamentally when one of your colleagues calls you and asks for help, the answer is yes. The answer is not what are you going to do for me in return or is there some kind of quid pro quo? The answer is, of course, I'm going to help you and I'm going to help your client because that's what we do at the firm. And that sounds pretty simple, but there are a surprising number of firms that don't actually handle that interaction that way. And it needs to be whether it is a senior partner or an associate, the answer needs to be the same and it doesn't matter if it's, you know, someone calling in Singapore from LA or calling Dallas from Brussels, it doesn't matter. The answer really has to be the same. So that's what it looks like. like how you get to that point really involves a lot of people in leadership modeling that behavior and doing the right thing every single day. It requires educating people on the ways that we do things and making sure that that is the way they're handling things. And the other thing I would say is unlike a lot of firms, we don't publish our compensation, we don't publish a lot of financial statistics. Those things are all part of it, but it's obviously many, many more things than that. How would you describe your leadership style then? You know, I try to be a good listener and make sure I'm understanding what it is that the people in the firm value and think is important and need. As we talked about earlier, talented lawyers need certain things to get good results and part of my job is to try to make sure they have those things that they need to get those results. Because when they do, they're happy. If they are experiencing roadblocks, certainly, organizational roadblocks is my job to help remove those obstructions. If we need particular skill sets that we don't have, or if there are opportunities to expand client relationships by hiring from the outsideist my job to try to help see that and make it happen. So one of the things I wanted to talk to you about Brian, because you are obviously a Siddly life, as you said, talk to me a little bit about the evolution of Siddly as a law firm over the past 10, 15 years. Because it has been quite significant, hasn't it? For sure, especially your expansion, your growth in London, for example. In your view, how has the firm kind of evolved in that period? Well, let me talk on a more macro level and then I can talk specifically about London where you are, which may be interesting to your, some portion of your viewership. At a macro level, just take a step back. We're 160-year-old law firm. We celebrate our 160th year this year. And so there's a lot of tradition and history and feeling of pride around that. We're the sixth largest firm in revenues as of recent measurements, 2025. And so we sit in a good spot. We're in a position of strength, both financially and in terms of our resources, our tradition, our history. But obviously you can't rest on your laurels, Oliver. You know that in this environment. And as you mentioned, in the last 10 years, a lot of things have changed quickly. And we've been adapting to that and changing quickly along with it. But the pace of change, and I mentioned that earlier, is there's no doubt it's accelerating and has accelerated. And the past 10 years have been a pretty critical period of time for us and for the whole legal industry. Turning to London, our roots in London go back more than 50 years. Some people don't realize that. We opened up in 1974, really with a very small outpost that was doing structured finance. We had a really strong, and so do finance and structured finance practice back then. And we followed some clients over to London, had clients there. And we had some lawyers go there and we hired some more over there and had a relatively small offering. Since then, we've really enjoyed slow and steady growth for about 40 years. And then in the last 10 to 15 years, it's really taken off. So now we're over 250 lawyers, about 300 million US in revenue. And just close out on a fantastic year in 2025 with over 30% revenue growth. So that has been really gratifying. Our office there now is a full service office. We are doing practicing UK law, US law, and some others that I won't itemize. But it really is covering the waterfront. And we're excited about what we've done in London. We're proud of it. I'd give a shout out to Tom Thiezing, who has been there for a big chunk of that growth. There's a lot of responsibility for what we've been able to accomplish there. But it's been an exciting and rapid period of growth for the last few years. Yeah, so Tom is the London Managing Partner at Sidley, isn't he? But I was actually talking to Tom semi-recently about this. And I remember, so I was practicing in the 2010s, Brian. And I was a structured finance lawyer in London. And I used to remember Sidley being on the other side of deals. And you'd see the old Sidley logo on the documents. And at that point, that is totally-- Sidley was known as this US firm. It didn't have a major presence at that time in London. And it was sort of finance specialist. And then you fast forward over the past decade. And it's turned into this kind of private equity leverage finance powerhouse. So was that quite intentional then that strategy? Was that spotted whenever it was mid 2010s and thought, right, this is where we need to invest? I get that question frequently. Was this-- happened to answer? Was it an intention? And on the answer, it was quite intentional. About eight, nine years ago, we realized that we really needed to be stronger in private equity. And this is worldwide. This is not just in London. We needed to be stronger in the practices that help support the private equity practice. And by that, I would include-- I would include in that funds. I would include in that structured finance. We've always been strong in. But that's an important leg of the stool, restructuring capital markets. These all help support the private equity practice. And yeah, we made a conscious effort to take the revenues that we've enjoyed over the years. I mentioned that we're the sixth largest firm in terms of revenues. And we took some of those, some of that money. And we reinvested it in private equity and a lot of the adjacencies. And it has worked out quite well. So in London, for instance, just in the last few years, we hired an infra team out of Wile. We hired a large finance team out of Latham. We hired a PE team out of Hall Weiss. And then more recently, we hired a funds team out of Wile. And these are all really, really good lawyers, good teams and have really helped expand and solidify our offering there. So the play is obviously to create a kind of-- that proper private equity/private capital platform in London. How does that kind of tie in to New York and Chicago? Because people often talk about this New York London access or corridor as a very important strategic kind of thing to get right for big firms. Tell me about that. Yeah. So you're referring Oliver to what what people call the nylon corridor, which is something that we think is real. New York, London, is really broader than New York. It includes other encompasses, other offices within the US. But the idea is that there's a real symbiotic relationship along that nylon corridor. And so we think that's a real thing. We think when you strengthen and grow particularly in certain practices like PE in New York, that that gives you benefit in London and vice versa. And so we've seen the benefit of that. Interestingly, one of the questions that we get most often, when I'm interviewing say a private equity candidate in New York is what are you doing in London? What are you doing in Europe? Tell me about your private equity practice in London. And you wouldn't think that would be among the first questions that would be asked. But I think that really is a testament to the validity of this concept of the nylon corridor. And just to break that down and give us an example, then this is most relevant, is it where we're talking about, let's say, a very large US private equity client. And they need that equally strong coverage in London. Is that basically the idea of so that they can do their deals in Europe out of London? Is that the idea? That's definitely part of the idea, but not the entire idea. For example, we have strategics that we work with in the US. And I won't name names. But large companies that have decided that Europe or the UK or even the Middle East is going to be part of their strategy going forward. And they would prefer to work with the firm that they're comfortable with in the US. And so they ask us what our capabilities are to help them out over there. And we need to have that offering. And it can't be a pretty good offering. It has to be a top shelf offering. But yeah, private equity. The large private equity firm would be the principle example of that, but there are many other examples. There's some smaller private equity shops that they want to expand. They've concluded that expanding in D'Alondon is a logical thing to do. They want us to help them. So you just want to be able to follow those kinds of clients from the US over to Europe and vice versa. And when you're thinking about where to invest then, what comes first, the hints from the clients or work research that you've done in advance of that and you're predicting where things are headed? It's both. I would say the ones where the clients are hinting, as you say, are the easy cases when a client hints to you that maybe you should be in this particular geography with these particular people. You take the hint. The harder cases are the ones where you're trying to project forward, what's the market going to look like? What are some strengths that we have that would help support growth in a particular way with particular kinds of lawyers in that market? Those are the ones that are a little harder. And to some extent, you're sort of betting on the come. But we do both. And what do those areas look like at the moment across New York and London because obviously all the action has been in private equity leverage finance over the past five years-ish? It seems like there's a lot of activity in the restructuring market in New York, for example. I know Sidley's made some restructuring highers in London, hasn't it? In the last couple of months. Where are you seeing, where's next, basically? So you mentioned the restructuring hires in London. We think that's a good area to focus on. We continue to think funds is sort of a core strength of ours. We have the largest hedge fund practice in the US. We think that could be an area for expansion in the US and elsewhere. We continue to think capital markets is a good area for us to expand. We have a big capital markets practice already, certainly in the US and a burgeoning one there. So those would be just off the top of my head some areas that we would think to invest in. And of course, on the dispute side, we're always looking for talented disputes, lawyers, wherever we can find them. And nature is such that there will always be disputes and we want to be there to help. So what does the London office look like in five years then, Brian? Can we expect, well, maybe even this year, can we expect a whole new announcements in terms of hires for Sidley? I'm not going to do any spoiler here, Oliver. But and I also don't think it's useful to prognosticate about numbers of lawyers in the firm or in any particular office or region. I what I can tell you is we're very bullish on not only our existing office and the talented lawyers we have there in London, but on the market and what we can do in the market. And I know it's a mature market. There are people to talk about that. But we think that we can do some some some really good things there and we think we have some strengths to build on. And so I would expect it to be bigger, more vibrant, more robust than it is now, which is saying a lot. So zooming out a bit then, let's talk about the kind of the competitive landscape a little bit. I mean, it's often spoken about in terms of kind of global elite, isn't it, these days? Who's part of the global elite and who's not? Do you pay much attention to that kind of race? Of course. Yeah. It's part of our job to pay attention to the competition and what they're doing and what we're doing within that. But the trend that you've identified is real. I think that the legal industry is consolidating into a smaller and smaller group and it's driven again by clients and client needs. Or looking for firms that have the scale and it's not for the sake of size. Clients don't care whether you're big or not. They don't care necessarily that you're way scaled up or not. They care that you can deliver services in a coherent cohesive way at the highest level of quality and on a very consistent basis. And that you can do it across disciplines and across the world. And when you really think about that, there aren't that many firms that can do that consistently and well. It's a smaller and smaller number and that consolidation has been happening and I think it will continue to happen. We're squarely within that and we will continue to be within that. So in other words, there's a kind of group of mainly, almost exclusively, US law firms of a certain revenue and profitability size scale that are kind of pulling away from the rest of the market. Is that what's happening? Yeah, I think that in a nutshell, it is what's happening. And the size, again, the size and scale doesn't matter in and of itself. What does matter is that it gives you the money to make investments that if you invest wisely in technology, in talent, we've already talked about talent in infrastructure. If you do all those things wisely and well and you have a big balance sheet and you have the scale already, it gives you a competitive advantage. There's no doubt about that. And we've seen those firms that have those advantages already become larger and larger. Well, the best example probably recently is Kirkland's $500 million AI investment that it announced. That seems to me like a great demonstration of that kind of financial firepower that those certain group of firms have as you've just outlined. Is that, that's an obvious area, isn't it? It is. AI would probably be the most obvious area of investment right now for most firms. Look, if you have 500 million in revenue as a firm or even a billion dollars in revenue as a firm and you conclude that what you really need to do is make hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in AI over the next few years, that's daunting and borderline impossible. If you have three or four or five or in Kirkland's case, more than that in revenue, it's possible and it actually is something that can happen without too much pain. So do you think that there are more room for in this kind of global elite cohort? It seems like all of the top law firms these days are pushing, they have aspirations to kind of get into that group. But how competitive is it? Is there room for more? Well, because as you said, a lot of it feels to me like it's driven by big strong relationships with large private capital clients in particular, but there can't be that much more work to sort of go around, is there? It's hard to say how big the cohort winds up being. People used to talk about the AMLAL 100. I mean, that's not all that relevant really for the conversation you're talking about right now. But is there room for 10, 20 law firms to be doing very high level work, of course? So thinking a little bit of head then, what do you think is going to kind of separate the winners over the next 10 years? It really comes back to some of the things that we've been talking about talent being first. Winning in the technology game is going to be very important. Getting the infrastructure and the YG graphics bread and having a multidisciplinary practice. Those are all things that we have and that are going to be very important to our success. But it's continuing to invest and invest wisely. That's the trick. Are there any firms in particular that you pay close attention to? Now we look at all of our peer firms, but we really define our peer firms in a very small way. There's a small number of firms that we spend our time thinking about. You can count them on about two hands. OK. I might know who they are. I won't ask you directly. So let's move on a little bit then to talent. I mean, we've touched on it a little bit already. But one of the things I wanted to ask you, this is a major trend, isn't it, in big law at the moment. And this is the introduction from almost all top US firms now of sort of so-called non-equity partners or income salaried partners. What's your view then, Brian, on the kind of emergence, the proliferation of these tears of partnership within the industry? Look, I think that all firms are thinking in all the ways that they can think about how to be competitive. You know, we've been talking a lot about competitiveness among law firms and large law firms in particular. And I think people are looking at their organizational structures through that lens. And as you pointed out, there's been a lot of changes to partnership organizational structures, particularly in the last few years to put firms in the best position possible to compete. I think beyond that, firms are really focused on developing their talent. As we were talking about earlier, it is a talent business. It's a talent game. And a big part of it is incentivizing the younger generation and junior lawyers to really give them the best possible environment in which to thrive. And in order to do that, you got to do a few things. You need to provide them with really interesting work. So we have 114 Chambers Ranked Practices across our firm. That's tracking some of the highest and most interesting work really across a broad array of different kinds of practices. So you provide good work. Obviously, you provide the appropriate financial incentives and financial structure to make it work people's while. And then you show them a good culture. And then finally, you provide opportunity. You need to show people that the firm is growing, has momentum. And is an organization that is working on cultivating talent, growing it from within, finding it outside the firm where necessary. And really showing people that they have an opportunity to thrive and have a great career at your firm. That's what it's all about. And that's what we focus on the most. It feels to me like it must be an important sort of retention mechanism as you kind of hint at as well. Because if you have lots of kind of peer rival firms with those tiers who are able to sort of say, "Hey, join us. We'll make you a partner." It's very difficult to kind of combat against that, isn't it? Yeah, your partnership structure goes to retention of talent, promotion of talent, attracting talent from outside. And you've got to make sure you've got a flexible structure that's able to do all of those things. But in addition, you need to have a place that is helping people develop their careers, develop their practices, and giving them the right platform with their clients to thrive. One of the things that we've done, we instituted this years ago as a program called Built to Lead, where we basically have groups of lawyers go off site to major universities and effectively get many, many MBAs from business leaders, academics, and the like. And these programs have been very, very successful and very popular with our associates because it really shows that we're investing in them as future leaders, we're investing in them to develop their skills, their client skills, and their business skills. And I think our clients appreciate that we're doing that with our talented people and making them better lawyers, better business people, and better on client service. So that's a program that we've had to be very successful and popular. Have you noticed a change in your time at Sidley in terms of what sort of future leaders want from their careers and what they expect? Not really. Future leaders expect to be performing at the highest level that they can perform at, and they want to be part of a winning organization, and they want to have opportunities for their personal growth. But one of the things I tell people all the time is that leadership isn't necessarily a title, it isn't necessarily an elected position. A lot of it is a frame of mind, and you can be a leader in a lot of different ways. You can be a thought leader by being, you know, the proverbial smartest person in the room with great ideas and thoughts. You can be a client service leader with ideas about how to better serve clients, and that's very valued within a law firm. You can be a cultural leader where you're bearing the culture well. There's just a lot of different ways to lead others, and we try to bring that out in everybody. What advice do you give to, you know, your ambitious junior lawyers, associates who are looking to make partner? Do the highest quality work first and foremost? That's table stakes at a firm like ours. Make yourself very important to some clients. If you can't have clients saying good things about you and saying, "Gee, I really want this person to become a partner at their firm," then you're probably not going to be a partner at a firm. And so that's very important. And then to be a good firm citizen, be somebody that others will be proud and happy to have you as a partner. And if you do those things, it'll generally take care of itself. Okay. Last one for you then, Brian. So what's next for Sidley Austin? What can we expect? We're going to keep growing. We're going to keep the momentum going that we've enjoyed over these past few years that I was describing for you. We're going to keep looking around corners on where the market is going. We're going to keep asking our clients the question, "Where do you see yourselves? Where do you want us to be with you?" As we go forward in this journey. And that's pretty much what we've been doing for years. That's what we've been trying to do, you know, under my tenure. And I think if we do that, everything else will take care of itself. Okay. Thanks for joining me. Thanks a lot, Oliver.