I’m not usually one to hum show tunes as I work, but “My Fair Lady” happens to be one of my favorite musicals, and as we were working on this issue I found myself plagued by an unusually persistent earworm: “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.”
For several years now, Spain has seen a lot of rain—not necessarily confined to the plain either. From failed banks to a sovereign debt crisis that tested the cohesion of the eurozone to excruciating unemployment levels, the downpour of bad news has been almost unrelenting. So I was surprised to learn last summer that White & Case had opened a brand-new office in Madrid with a team of 10 lawyers recruited from Latham & Watkins. Why would any sensible law firm want to be in Spain these days if it had a choice? I asked contributing writer Susan Hansen, a former American Lawyer writer who has been reporting on European legal markets for us for more than a decade, to find out what White & Case was doing there.
