Jon Robins looks at the law firms behind London’s Olympic bid

‘When we went into the room, all the cameras were lined up in front of the Paris team,’ recalls solicitor Charlie Wijeratna, commercial and legal director of the London 2012 Olympic bid team.


He was sitting next to England chief Sven-Goran Eriksson at the Raffles City Convention Centre in Singapore last month to hear whether they would be bringing the 2012 Olympics back to London. As the rounds of voting saw Moscow, New York and Madrid knocked out, it left London and Paris head-to-head in the final ballot. ‘Sven and I feared the worst,’ the former Clifford Chance lawyer recalls. ‘We thought someone had tipped off the photographers.’


When International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Jacques Rogge announced London was the winner, Mr Wijeratna described the mood as ‘absolutely amazing – and certainly the best moment of my life’. He recalls: ‘Everyone just went nuts. But we only had 18 hours to enjoy it all before we were brought back down to earth with a bump.’ Although the triumphant mood came to an abrupt end with news of the London bombings the following day, work began on the 2012 games straightaway. Within days of the decision, the London Olympics Bill received its second reading debate in the House of Commons. That legislation creates the Olympic Delivery Authority, the body responsible for constructing the main park, the stadium, Olympic village and all the other facilities.


Behind the successful bid were several top City firms. ‘It was a very satisfying moment,’ says Tim Jones, head of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer’s London corporate department, of the Singapore decision. ‘We had worked on the bid for a couple of years and it’s one of those processes that the more you understand it, the more it sweeps you along. We were all excited by the London story and the regeneration possibilities for the city.’ Among London 2012’s ‘major partners’ were Ashurst, Clifford Chance and Freshfields, which all provided the bid with a substantial amount of legal advice in exchange for ‘supportership’ rights. Freshfields acted as general corporate counsel to the bid; Ashurst advised on infrastructure and employment work; and Clifford Chance advised on intellectual property, sponsorship deals and branding. Berwin Leighton Paisner was among the next tier of supporters and agreed to write off a small amount of legal fees for providing planning advice in exchange for association rights.


So how important was the backing of the legal profession to London’s success? ‘It was absolutely crucial, because one of the things that we demonstrated was the professionalism of the bid. A significant part of that was down to the fantastic support we had from the law firms that provided us with people and resources,’ says Mr Wijeratna. The firms worked for sponsorship rights and, in return for their partner status, they agreed to contribute a number of hours. ‘It wasn’t pro bono,’ he explains. ‘We invoiced them for the value of the “supportership”, and they sent us invoices for the work done.’


Clifford Chance’s Canary Wharf HQ became a second home to the bid team and, for example, last November played host to the launch of the candidate file, the blueprint for how the games would be run, with more than 600 journalists and guests in attendance. Why was it important for Clifford Chance to be so involved? ‘Firstly, we have a long tradition of being involved in major sporting activities and, secondly, we saw it as a good thing for London and Britain as a whole,’ comments Daniel Sandelson, the partner co-ordinating the firm’s legal work for London 2012. ‘But it’s also relevant to the area where our London office is, and we wanted to show our involvement to help the games come about.’


So how did CC’s legal advice help the bid? ‘Even though the games were a long way away and, of course, there was the added contingency of whether we were going to get them at all, we had to structure the agreements in such a way that venues, hotels and advertising providers would sign up now and then commit themselves at a point in the future,’ he says. ‘That took some thinking.’ Mr Sandelson points out that there is no direct expectation of work flowing from their pre-bid involvement. ‘The IOC rules state that people who back the bid can’t have any post-awards rights,’ he explains.


The planning team at Berwin Leighton Paisner first became involved in the bid at the time of the report by consultants ARUP on the benefits of hosting the games back at the end of 2002.


‘One of the real problems from a planning point of view was how the four London boroughs involved would co-operate [because their record of working together had not been great],’ explains Ian Trehearne, head of planning at the City firm. ‘There was an urban development corporation set up to provide an alternative route if needs be, which had all the necessary and sweeping powers [to force plans through] and also there was the possibility in that timetable to call a planning inquiry,’ he says. ‘But both those things would have had a democratic deficit.’


The single planning permission pulled together by London Mayor Ken Livingstone was easily the most desirable solution. ‘But nobody believed that it was possible at the beginning,’ he says.


The legal work went far beyond those firms directly involved with London 2012. Birmingham-based national firm Wragge & Co, for example, acted for the Greater London Authority on the bid. It advised on the formation of London 2012 and, more recently, on the London Olympic Committee of the Games (LOCOG), which is charged with staging the games.


‘It was felt very much that if the arrangements for LOCOG were put in place and ready to be activated in time for the Olympic evaluation commission when it visited London in February, that could be seen as an important selling point,’ explains Stephen Sellers, director of regeneration at Wragges.


However, not everyone is delighted about the arrival of the world’s largest sports event on their doorstep in seven years’ time. London firm Finers Stephens Innocent is advising 110 businesses near and around the eastern part of the City. The games will take place on a 1,500-acre ‘sports campus’ in east London’s Lower Lea Valley. As Finers points out, one reason for the City’s success is because the bid team assured the judges that London could deliver the site by using ‘the blunt instrument of compulsory purchase’.


Michael Nathan, a partner at the firm, reckons that up to 11,000 jobs in the 308 businesses are at risk. ‘If they don’t agree deals for their new sites within the next 12 to 15 months, they will face a compulsory purchase order and the ultimate sanction is they get chucked out,’ he says. The ‘biggest concern’ for those businesses is ‘the apparent shortage of places to move at the right price and in the right location’. As Mr Nathan puts it, businesses in a notoriously deprived part of the capital ‘have enjoyed fairly low land and rental values’.


Those law firms that have helped London 2012 are understandably hoping they will be well-placed to pick up the legal work now that the Olympic dream starts to become reality. Mr Trehearne says Berwin Leighton Paisner was ‘thrilled’ with the Singapore decision. ‘The Olympics will be the biggest thing for the next three years, and that’s where people start getting paid,’ he says.


Mr Wijeratna is currently assembling a legal panel and expects to instruct two firms for every area of advice. He says the bid was prepared ‘as if we were organising the games’ and ‘so clearly those firms will have some advantage in that they know what’s going on’.


He points out that the Olympic Delivery Authority alone will be spending some £2.5 billion. ‘Firms took a sensible view that the Olympics would be fantastic for London and for the economy and, frankly, the amount of legal work that falls out of winning the bid is just huge,’ he says.


Jon Robins is a freelance journalist