Scottish outfit Brodies just scooped up Leeds-based Barton Legal to beef up their construction practice and plant a flag outside London for the first time. Bill Barton brings his entire eight-person crew with him after running the shop since 2007, and the guy has been grinding in construction law for over three decades while bouncing between DLA Piper and Walker Morris before going solo. Managing partner Stephen Goldie said they keep picking up more northern England construction clients, so absorbing Barton made sense for expanding their contentious and non-contentious teams.
Barton posted on social media about how stoked he was to join a firm that actually cares about people while still being hungry to grow. The move gives Brodies six...
Fastcase is going after Canadian AI startup Alexi for allegedly turning a limited-use licensing deal into a full competitor platform using their case law database. The lawsuit dropped in Washington, DC claims the Toronto outfit violated the 2021 agreement by building their legal research tool off Fastcase data instead of keeping it internal, and then slapped Fastcase trademarks on the interface to look legit. Fastcase got absorbed into vLex before Clio bought the whole operation for a billion bucks.
Alexi CEO Mark Doble says the accusations are total nonsense and that his company stayed within the contract terms the entire time. Clio backed up the lawsuit by saying they take intellectual property theft seriously and have systems to...
Latham & Watkins just poached four private equity heavyweights from Freshfields in Germany, and the group brings some serious dealmaking firepower with them. Markus Paul used to run Freshfields' continental Europe operation before jumping ship along with veteran partner Wessel Heukamp, rising star Verena Nosch, and newly minted partner Carsten Haak. Paul will land in the Frankfurt office with Haak, while Heukamp and Nosch set up shop in Munich.
The move comes after Latham lost a six-lawyer PE team to Weil earlier this year and watched M&A partner Tobias Larisch bounce to open Kirkland & Ellis' Frankfurt office. Paul has tight relationships with major firms like Permira after advising on the massive Adevinta buyout, and Heukamp recently...
L'Oréal just doubled down on its Galderma investment by grabbing another 10 percent from the EQT-led consortium that also had Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Auba Investment holding stakes. Bär & Karrer repped the French beauty giant while Homburger backed EQT, and Niederer Kraft Frey jumped in for Galderma with Ropes & Gray handling antitrust stuff. The cosmetics company originally co-owned the Swiss dermatology outfit with Nestlé before bailing back in 2014, but they bought back in last year, chasing that injectable aesthetics market.
CEO Nicolas Hieronimus called it a successful bet that they wanted to expand, while Galderma boss Flemming Ørnskov said the extra cash validates their growth plan. The companies made clear there are...
King & Wood Mallesons is breaking up after the Chinese and Australian partnerships decided to pull the plug on their 14-year marriage that started back when everybody thought merging across continents was genius. The Australian side will rebrand as Mallesons and operate independently, while the China operation keeps the King & Wood name, and Hong Kong stays with the Chinese crew. Staff got the memo about terminating cooperation from Australia chair David Friedlander and chief executive partner Renae Latty.
The Verein structure they have been running gets dissolved at the end of March next year, but both sides will keep working together on a non-exclusive basis for client stuff. Offices in Japan and the US stick with the Chinese firm...
Limpopo held a major funeral for 31-year-old Constable Tlhonolofatso Fredens Machete after her boyfriend, Sergeant Ngoveni Matimba Gift, shot her multiple times inside Ritavi Police Station before turning the gun on himself. The whole thing went down at the Community Service Centre, where colleagues had taken her for safety after she called them during a domestic fight at her rental place. Hundreds packed the Red Vultures Sports Ground while Deputy Minister Cassel Mathale gave tributes about her dedication to fighting crime in the Mopani District.
The murder-suicide happened right in the middle of the 16 Days of Activism campaign against gender-based violence, and Provincial Commissioner Thembi Hadebe called out how even cops are not...
The SABC's New York crew just picked up a gold medal at the UN Correspondents Awards for an interview they did with the top humanitarian guy at the United Nations. Sherwin Bryce-Pease and Aaron Berbrick got recognized for their September sit-down with Tom Fletcher, where he talked about aid workers getting emotionally wrecked and funding running dry for crises in Gaza, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Ricardo Ortega Memorial Prize went to them after judges decided their broadcast coverage stood out among global entries.
Fletcher broke down how dangerous the job gets for relief coordinators working conflict zones, and the team managed to make those struggles hit home for South African viewers. The award ceremony went...
Minister Buti Manamela just dropped another deregistration notice on Damelin, City Varsity, and ICESA City Campus after the Educor-owned schools kept missing deadlines for their annual reports and financial paperwork. The three private colleges are getting threatened with shutdown barely nine months after clawing their way back to full registration status, and thousands of students are sweating about whether their degrees will even count or if they will need to scramble for transfers. The whole mess circles back to the same compliance issues that got them axed before, like skipping audited statements and tax certificates.
The department keeps saying the schools had multiple extensions to get their act together, but they still failed to...
Officials are scrambling to stop Thabos Dam from completely eating it after weeks of nonstop rainfall pushed the wall to its breaking point near Bronkhorstspruit. Emergency crews are cutting drainage channels around the embankment to relieve pressure, and they have already moved people out of nearby farms while warning drivers on the R513 and R568 that flash flooding could wreck those routes. The whole mess is complicated by the fact that nobody even registered this dam with the Department of Water and Sanitation, so engineers are working blind on basic details about the structure.
Locals are stuck dealing with a crumbling dam wall that doubles as their only road access, and some are getting cut off from supplies while trying to keep...
