About Us

Who we are and how we work

We are one of the world’s largest law firms, with significant depth and range of resources across five continents.

As a single, fully integrated, global partnership, we pride ourselves on our approachable, collegial and team-based way of working.

We always strive to exceed the expectations of our clients, which include corporates from all the commercial and industrial sectors, the financial investor community, governments, regulators, trade bodies and not-for-profit organisations. We provide them with the highest-quality advice and legal insight, which combines the Firm’s global standards with in-depth local expertise.

Last, but not least, we aim to be easy to work with, down to earth and approachable.

• Putting clients first
  We expect our people to put the interests of our clients first: we invest in understanding client organisations, their operating context and the opportunities and challenges they face.
• Creating the best team
  We believe in the power of teams, rather than individuals: to secure successful outcomes, we bring together groups of people with just the right mix of sector, product and jurisdictional knowledge.
• Giving product advice
  We give practical advice: we draw on the huge range and depth of our expertise to develop commercial, effective solutions for clients.
• Nurturing a culture with integrity and respect at its core
  We are committed to nurturing a high performance culture founded on robust ethical standards, professional integrity, responsibility, accountability, inclusiveness and kindness. Our values-based Code of Conduct sets the standard for what we expect of ourselves and of each other.
• Investing in the future
  We invest for the future: we have always taken the view that we must invest today to build the firm our clients will need 15, 20 or more years into the future. As a result, our resources are world-class, whether our people, our know-how, our approach to client service, or our sheer geographic footprint across 32 major financial centres across the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

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Our story

As a firm, we look to the future rather than to the past.

While the roots of Clifford Chance stretch back to the City of London of the early 1800s, our story is more about a series of moments when we changed the legal landscape.

1987 – 2000

Today’s Clifford Chance came into being when successful London firms Coward Chance and Clifford Turner merged to form the pre-eminent law firm in Europe, taking the legal world by storm. The merger was predicated on the shared belief that the world’s leading organisations would seek legal advice that was able to look beyond borders or narrow areas of expertise.

2000 – today

Then, in 2000, Clifford Chance undertook a major international tripartite merger with Germany’s Pünder Volhard Weber & Axster and New York-based Rogers & Wells. The combination of the three firms’ geographic footprint and breadth of expertise created the world’s first global law firm. To this day, we remain the only non-franchise law firm with real breadth and depth of expertise across Europe, Asia Pacific, the Americas and the Middle East.

Today

Focusing on the future and anticipating evolving client needs is not only about understanding where clients will want legal advice but also about how they want that service delivered. During the past few years, Clifford Chance has been at the forefront of developments that have changed fundamentally the management of law firms – from the adoption of IT systems and sophisticated document management processes to investment in ‘best-in-class’ learning and development to creation of efficient and cost-effective offshore legal support, administrative, business research and technology centres.

But whatever changes we have anticipated in the past are nothing compared with those that lie ahead of us. Our sights are set firmly on staying in the vanguard of the legal industry as it evolves to meet the demands of a more complex, faster changing, more connected world.