Mishcon de Reya delays IPO

Mishcon de Reya delays IPO

Top 40 UK Firm will wait till the market conditions improve to list on the London Stock Exchange

The highly anticipated listing on the London Stock Exchange of Mishcon de Reya, a Top 40 firm in the UK, has been delayed due to market volatility.

The Global Legal Post recognises that Mishcon won't go ahead with its IPO till the market conditions are accurate, with an expected valuation of £750m which would make Mishcon the highly valued listed law firm in the UK.

According to Mishcon in April 2021, the IPO could occur as soon as the fourth quarter of 2021 when it hired JP Morgan to advise it on a potential listing.

As a result of the market turmoil, a number of companies have been delayed from going public including Dutch file sharing company WeTransfer, which abruptly cancelled an IPO on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange a day before mentioning extreme instability.

Nine other companies have put off IPOs in New York as well, according to Bloomberg, including cloud-based human resources platform, Justworks. According to the report, the UK firm now considers the second quarter to be the earliest window.

It was first discussed at the firm in 2019 but a majority of 93percent of the partnership approved Mishcon's IPO on September 2021, comfortably above the 75percent needed to proceed.

As a result of a five-year plan to more than double revenues from £189million in 2021 to £400million over five years, the company has been operating for the last five years. According to GLP, the rationale behind Mishcon's decision to go public, namely that it will generate growth by providing capital to expand the firm's core legal services, litigation funding arm and consultancy businesses and existence in Asia, still valid.

A number of partners at Mishcon have left since it was voted to go public in September 2021. Among them are the five partners in its highly regarded fraud defence group and the leader of its white-collar crime practice. They all joined Greenberg Traurig in London.

In December, the firm appointed white-collar expert and investigations specialist Alison Geary as a partner from WilmerHale, and to that end, the firm announced this week that it has hired two more London partners, health and safety lawyer Kizzy Augustin, who joins from Russell-Cooke and Campbell Forsyth, who will join from Dentons.

An anti-money laundering fine of £232,500 imposed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in January 2022 has caused negative publicity for the firm. It was one of the largest one-off fines the authority had ever imposed. In October, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal fined the firm £25,000 for failing to provide appropriate information about football transfer payments.

Mishcon's spokesperson is yet to disclose on the firm's IPO plans.