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Overview
Everything has changed in the Icelandic legal market. Following the credit crunch-induced economic implosion in late 2008, the jurisdiction’s small corporate legal community have been forced to shift their focus almost overnight from supporting rapid, heady economic growth, built primarily on the perceived success of Iceland’s banking and financial sector, to becoming what one lawyer termed ‘firemen’, providing urgent advice to a crisis-stricken banking and business community. What had been a market increasingly dominated by a wave of sophisticated financing and optimistic outbound M&A transactions has become one where lawyers have quickly become experts on emergency bankruptcy law rushed through in response to the nationalisation of three of Iceland’s largest banks. In the short-term, Icelandic firms have thrived on advising the myriad of parties tied up in Iceland’s failed banking system, with smaller full-service practices finding themselves as heavily involved as dominant market players LOGOS legal services, BBA // Legal and Lex Law Offices. However, behind the frantic activity is an underlying uncertainty over how the legal market is likely to adapt in the long-term, to what is sure to be a vastly different, post-crisis environment.