The flamboyant lawyer who took on the magic circle

Neel Sachdev is not your average corporate lawyer. Whether it’s his long mane of slicked-back hair, his unbuttoned shirt, or his greeting of colleagues with “Dude”, there is little in his make-up that would make you think: here is private equity’s go-to guy for legal advice on multibillion-pound takeovers.
Yet this is exactly the lofty position he now occupies. Sachdev, 49, has become one of the City’s most successful corporate lawyers, earning tens of millions of pounds a year.
Along the way, he has gleefully ruffled the feathers of the legal establishment, which for so long was dominated by the five “magic circle” firms: Clifford Chance, Freshfields, Linklaters, Slaughter and May and Allen & Overy (now A&O Shearman). These practices, filled with the best legal minds that Oxbridge could produce, advise blue-chip companies and even the royal family.
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Sachdev, by contrast, has spent the past two decades working for more aggressive American law firms who have planted their flag in London. First, he poached the rainmakers of elite English law firms to join the London office of the US legal juggernaut Kirkland & Ellis, where he plied his trade for 20 years. Now, he is co-head of the London office of New York firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and he is poaching even more aggressively — including from his former employer, Kirkland.
He clearly enjoys tormenting the old guard. “My view on the magic circle is that they are shrinking,” he said. “They are saturated at the partner level and their underlying business is not growing … A&O cut 10 per cent of its partners. That is not a growing business, that is a business in need of rationalisation [cost-cutting].”
Sachdev’s background could not be more different from that of his peers. While they were often from moneyed English backgrounds, his father had brought the family over from Kenya in the 1970s and ran a newsagents in London’s then-grimy Clerkenwell. Sachdev Sr scrimped to put him through private school and, when he was seven, told him he had three options in life: become a doctor, a banker, or a lawyer.After graduating from Nottingham University, Sachdev took the last of those options and landed a job at Freshfields — but he felt his face didn’t fit there. “It was very much a closed shop. I was not really invited in; none of them looked like me,” he said, adding with a roaring laugh: “Plus I had long hair.”With his penchant for beaded bracelets, bespoke tailored suits and red socks, Sachdev’s flamboyant manner is more reminiscent of a stage magician than that of a stodgy corporate lawyer. “He is a bit Marmite,” a former colleague said. “I personally liked him, but it’s a personality type you don’t see a lot [in law].”
Sachdev, who joined Paul, Weiss last year, has been at the vanguard of a wave of disruption washing over the profession. The English status quo was first upended twenty years ago when deep-pocketed US firms such as Kirkland and Latham & Watkins set up outposts in London and started recruiting from the magic circle.
US firms acted as the handmaidens to the private equity industry, raking in fees advising on everything from takeovers to restructurings, and doing the sort of work the magic circle firms were initially reluctant to take on, in the mistaken belief it wouldn’t be lucrative in the long term.
“[The US law firms] were seen as being too cut-throat, too money driven,” said Sachdev, who was warned against “doing a deal with the Devil” when he jumped to Kirkland in 2003. US firms used their financial muscle to outgun their British counterparts on pay. Sachdev was at the centre of the US invasion: “the hunting ground for Kirkland were Freshfields and Linklaters,” he recalled, with a grin.
In a recent attempt to catch up with their American cousins, British firms have been trying to buy up their US rivals to make inroads across the Atlantic. Last week, the Herbert Smith Freehills merged with its US counterpart Kramer Levin. In June, Allen & Overy finalised a merger with the US firm Shearman & Sterling, to create the fourth-largest law firm in the world, A&O Shearman.
Sachdev learnt his trade at Kirkland, which he considers to be a ‘Harvard Business School case study’ of how to run a law firm. But he is critical of the rapid expansion at his former employer, where the ranks of partners have swollen to nearly 550.
“Kirkland didn’t stop [hiring]; we carried on, which is demotivating to your young talent if you bring in partners perpetually,” he said. Paul, Weiss intends to run a smaller ship, and promote internally. “If you look at Kirkland & Ellis or Clifford Chance, these firms have become huge. It is much more difficult, in our view, to be a true partnership at that scale.”
By last summer, Sachdev had himself grown restless. Along with Kirkland ally Roger Johnson, he held secret negotiations with Brad Karp, the global head of Paul, Weiss, over setting up a London outpost. Karp, who spent the evening of the US election with Kamala Harris, pitched the idea of a UK expansion to partners as a “once-in-a-lifetime investment that will help the long-term success of our firm”.Paul, Weiss’s partners agreed to pour millions into bankrolling a London start-up. Sachdev, Johnson and 14 other Kirkland partners jumped ship in a move that astounded the City.
“It was very daunting,” said Sachdev, who admitted he was initially concerned that he wouldn’t be able to convince top lawyers at rival firms to join him.He need not have worried. Over the past year, Paul, Weiss has hired nearly 40 new partners and 200 lawyers in London. Sachdev did this by wining and dining targets at West End Michelin-star restaurants, where he sold the career move as “the equivalent of going to a start-up backed by Microsoft”. The eye-popping salaries he dangled in front of them — some experienced lawyers were offered £8 million a year — no doubt helped seal the deal for many.“It has never been done. It takes decades to grow a practice of this size,” Sachdev said, adding with a shrug: “I thought it would be harder.” Two other legal recruiters agreed it was unprecedented.
Sachdev has brought over dozens of his old colleagues. “The irony is that the blueprint for building Paul, Weiss was the blueprint I learnt at Kirkland,” he said. This summer, the firm even poached the top internal lawyer at TDR Capital, one of its private equity clients. “They really mean business,” laughed one legal recruiter in the City.
It has not all gone Sachdev’s way, however. City sources said he has struggled to recruit litigation partners, and others downplayed the impact his departure would have on Kirkland. An insider said the firm had retained plenty of work from his clients.
This year, Sachdev and Johnson relocated Paul, Weiss’s London office from the City to the West End, close to the plush Mayfair offices of private equity clients such as Bain Capital and Warburg Pincus. The new offices used to be occupied by Twitter but were abandoned after the social network was bought by Elon Musk, who went on a mass firing spree. Sachdev described negotiations to take on the lease, conducted with Musk’s private office, as “the toughest deal” of his life.He is planning to open a juice bar and a “barista area” and even to recruit a sushi chef to feed his highly paid troops. That’s on top of the pizza oven he inherited from Musk in the staff canteen. The youngest recruits at Paul, Weiss earn £180,000 from the day they qualify, the highest rate of any City firm. He is also promising an accelerated path to partnership, compared with Magic Circle firms.Like other US legal practices, however, Paul, Weiss gets its pound of flesh in return. Staff can expect to work more than 70 hours a week when the firm is handling a takeover. “I want to be honest with people — it is a commitment. I never bought into the lack of authenticity you see at a lot of law firms around, ‘Oh, you can strike a work-life balance’,” said Sachdev.
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But rivals, perturbed by Sachdev’s hiring spree, question whether Paul, Weiss will bring in enough clients in London to justify the outlay. “I’m not sure the maths works in the immediate term. Can they hit the numbers they need quickly enough to stop Paul, Weiss in New York from having a meltdown about bankrolling this London office?” said one City legal source. Another competitor said: “Time will tell whether it pays off — let the deals do the talking.” While Paul Weiss sources in the UK and America accepted that the London office had required a significant initial investment, they insisted that the British outpost will be profitable this year because the lawyers it has recruited have brought over their lucrative client work.
Sachdev said his hiring spree, which has put plenty of noses out of joint and a target on his back, is nearing its end. And London’s most flamboyant lawyer couldn’t resist a parting shot at his rivals.
“We don’t want to be the biggest,” he said with a mischievous grin. “We want to be the greatest.”