The Legal 500

The firm

Bredin Prat is a pre-eminent law firm, with offices in Paris and Brussels. Founded in the 1960s, the firm is widely recognised as providing legal advice that meets the highest standards of expertise and sophistication in its selected practice areas. Over the past few years, the firm’s growth from a leading French corporate and litigation boutique to an over 100-lawyer-strong firm has mirrored the evolution of its domestic and cross-border practice and client base.

This expansion has strengthened Bredin Prat’s commitment to depth of experience through a remarkably high partner-to-associate ratio and the intense personal involvement and reputation of its partners.

The firm’s partners of all generations, are regularly named in the press and are unanimously recognised by peers and clients, and by the legal world generally, as being among the best European lawyers in their respective fields.

Bredin Prat regularly advises on a wide variety of complex cross-border transactions and disputes.

In what the firm strongly believes to be a superior model to the ‘one-stop shops’, Bredin Prat has co-pioneered a cross-border integrated team approach for pan-European matters with its key ‘Best Friends’ – the leading independent firms in their respective jurisdictions – including Slaughter and May (UK), Hengeler Mueller (Germany), Bonelli Erede Pappalardo (Italy) and Uria Menendez (Spain). Bredin Prat has also developed special relationships with other leading firms in several other European jurisdictions and also in Asia Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and the US.

This Best Friend model allows Bredin Prat to handle cross-border matters in integrated teams with the best lawyers in each jurisdiction and the firm’s track record in handling complex, multi-jurisdictional matters on this basis is strong and highly appreciated by its most sophisticated clients.

The close working relationships built between the Best Friends are reinforced through several joint initiatives, such as cross-secondments, training programmes and publications.

Areas of practice

Following the firm’s tradition of specialisation in chosen practice areas or in specific types of transactions – as opposed to a broad-based corporate and commercial practice – the firm’s transactional work today focuses on securities and public takeover law, significant (and often cross-border or multi-jurisdictional) mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, joint ventures and reorganisations, privatisation, tax, financing and corporate finance, insolvency and restructuring, and employment. Similarly, a significant part of Bredin Prat’s litigation practice – representing French and foreign clients before the French courts, French and European Community regulatory bodies, and French and international arbitral tribunals – concentrates today on finance, securities law, corporate law, tax law, employment, competition and antitrust law, and white-collar criminal matters related to these areas. The firm’s traditional civil and private international law practice in particularly complex matters continues to represent an important part of its litigation and arbitration practice. The firm’s Brussels office advises on EU law, with a particular focus on competition law , mergers and state aid.

Languages
Arabic
English
French
German
Italian
Polish
Russian
Spanish

Other offices Brussels

International groupings Best Friends

Number of lawyers 130

at this office 124