(Bloomberg) —
Mishcon de Reya LLP, the U.K. law firm looking to be the largest publicly traded law firm, has delayed its planned listing for a second time, according to people familiar with the matter.
The London law firm, initially targeting a listing in January with a valuation of at least 750 million pounds ($1 billion), is now considering selling shares in the second quarter at the earliest, the people said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private. It comes as a global stocks rout and surging volatility complicate companies’ path to market.
Mishcon’s IPO would make it the world’s largest listed law firm but it’s recently faced a raft of negative publicity after being hit with a record fine from its regulator over failings with anti-money laundering controls.
Still, it’s not the first IPO hopeful to be put off by volatile markets. File-sharing platform WeTransfer, set to be Europe’s first large listing of the year, withdrew its IPO Thursday after a selloff in technology stocks hit investor appetite. In New York, the market turmoil has forced at least nine firms to put off IPOs, including cloud-based human resources platform Justworks Inc. and Four Springs Capital Trust.
Worries about inflation, the prospect of rapid interest rate hikes and the threat of war between Ukraine and Russia have set global equities on course for their worst month since the pandemic started, weighing on investor appetite for new stocks.
Going public in the U.K. became possible in 2011 after regulators became less resistant to external investment, but to date, the number of listed law firms can be counted on two hands.
With an IPO, Mishcon would be the largest of a small number of publicly traded law firms including Manchester-based DWF Group Plc, which has a market capitalization of around 375 million pounds.
A spokesperson for Mishcon declined to comment.
Mishcon’s litigation department coupled with a client roster of oligarchs and wealthy individuals was one of the key drivers of its reputation in the U.K. The Times of London called it “legendarily pugnacious.” The firm’s website boasts the fact that its deputy chairman was the lawyer for Princess Diana in her divorce while its current managing partner was Gina Miller’s attorney in her successful Brexit battles that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
But since then, the plans for the IPO have been anything but smooth. An earlier proposal to consider a public flotation was rejected in 2019 when partners voted against the idea, before being revived last spring.
Then late last year, almost 20 lawyers including seven partners left the firm to work at the London offices of U.S. law firm Greenberg Traurig LLP. The departures included some of the firm’s most high-profile names in white collar crime and investigations — one of the very departments in which Mishcon built a name for itself.
(Updates with background throughout)
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