Freshfields - Playbook

Want to stand out in your Freshfields Vacation Scheme application? Here’s a new Playbook to help you impress.

This Playbook covers
🧠 Freshfields' strategy for growth
👥 Insights from recent hires
🌍 Office expansion insights
📊 Must know financial data
💼 Key clients and deals

🧠 Practice Area Strategy

In short: Freshfields is building three strategic pillars—private capital, antitrust/regulatory, and energy transition—while fiercely defending its historic European M&A dominance through continued investment and lateral hiring.

Details:

Private capital has emerged as perhaps the most visible growth engine. Freshfields won the British Legal Awards 2024 Private Capital Team of the Year and holds a Chambers Band 1 ranking for global private equity—credentials that matter when competing for sponsor-driven mandates against Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins. The February 2025 Boston office launch was explicitly designed to serve private equity sponsors and life sciences companies, two client bases with significant overlap in that market. The firm has recruited aggressively to build this capability (see Key Hires below). This matters because private equity clients increasingly demand full-service capability across jurisdictions—they want one firm that can handle the buyout, the financing, the regulatory clearance, and eventually the exit, whether in New York, London, or Frankfurt.

Antitrust and regulatory work represents Freshfields' most strategic investment area. The rationale is straightforward: as deal scrutiny intensifies globally, clients need advisers who genuinely understand how regulators think. Freshfields' solution has been to hire the regulators themselves. The entire 16-partner US antitrust team was selected to the 2026 Lawdragon 500 Leading Global Antitrust & Competition Lawyers guide—a remarkable achievement for a practice built largely through recent lateral recruitment.