Commentary: A slice of fudge with your snake oil, sir?

Who knows what highly intelligent analysis was put to Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer by McKinsey? The firm's banking partners certainly seem to be struggling to communicate what insights the consultants have imparted, or what action the firm now intends to take to develop its finance practice.

But reading the runes, the notoriously pricey consultants essentially decided that Freshfields needs to build stronger relations with its core clients - hardly radical stuff and pretty much what the firm's peers, save Slaughters, concluded a decade ago.

In response, partners point out - with varying degrees of enthusiasm - that it is good to have the obvious reaffirmed once in a while and stress it has injected some purpose into a department so long derided as the Cinderella of the magic circle firm's City offering. But it is difficult to see how the firm intends to move forward, or what ideas Freshfields has for developing what rivals still claim is more of a collection of quality niche practices than a broad church finance practice.

So, despite winning plaudits for its work in project finance, structured finance, securitisation and derivatives, in vanilla banking areas of corporate lending - leveraged finance and debt capital markets - Freshfields clearly lags behind its rivals.

This is despite the fact that those teams boast young and well-regarded partners such as Brian Gray and Sean Pearce, along with more experienced hands including David Ereira.

Neither is the client base the problem, with Fresh-fields handling regular work for Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays Bank. It is the amount and range of work that the firm is handling for these clients that is the issue.

Culturally - the firm acknowledges this - a tradition of focusing on individual mandates has probably held too much sway at the expense of institutionalising the relationships.

But it is hard to escape the conclusion that the real issue is will, or rather a lack of it.

If the firm really wants to build a broader finance practice it clearly has the brand and resources to achieve the aim - although having avoided making the flashy finance hires of some London rivals 10 years ago, such an achievement would be considerably harder now.

So perhaps the real answer for Freshfields lies less in trying to sell some reheated strategy and more in accepting that it has a highly capable finance team combined with some real centres of excellence.

After all, trying to really bulk up in finance carries the risk of conflicting corporate and will not necessarily correspond into referrals - quite aside from the fact that the firm's M&A practice is no slouch at getting banking referrals on its own.

At a time when most law firms are trying to be more like every other, Freshfields could be forgiven for wanting to be, well Freshfields.

Being itself has so far given it what is now arguably Europe's best corporate outfit and surely no amount of snake oil is going to dupe them into reversing that.