DealBook: Justice Dept. Again Signals Interest to Pursue Financial Crisis Cases

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DealBook: Deutsche Bank’s Shares Rise as Its Leaders Look Past Financial Crisis

Boris Roessler/DPA, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJürgen Fitschen, left, and Anshu Jain, co-chiefs of Deutsche Bank of Germany.

4:58 p.m. | Updated FRANKFURT — Shares in Deutsche Bank rose for a second day after the bank sold 2.96 billion euros ($3.87 billion) in new stock on Tuesday to help it bolster the size of its capital reserves.

Deutsche Bank has long faced criticism that its capital buffers, the money that banks set aside to absorb losses in a crisis, were inadequate and that it carried too much risk from derivatives and other volatile investment banking products.

But since taking over last year, Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen, the bank’s co-chief executives, have been hoarding profit and selling assets to raise the proportion of capital to money at risk. Bank officials insisted that the share sale was not done in response to pressure from regulators in Europe or the United States.

“It was our decision,” Mr. Jain said on Tuesday during a conference call with analysts. “There was no gun to the head.”

Still, the move will go a long way toward ending the bank’s reputation as one of Europe’s riskiest and least-capitalized lenders. The new capital will allow it to rank near the top among large European banks in the size of its reserves, rather than near the bottom, and to comfortably meet new regulatory requirements.

The bank also raised more than it aimed for when it first announced the share sale on Monday. Institutional investors paid 32.90 euros a share for the new equity, Deutsche Bank said, a discount to the market price in Frankfurt on Tuesday of 35.03 euros.

Shares of Deutsche Bank, the largest German lender, rose 5 percent in New York trading on Tuesday on expectations that the share sale will clear the way for higher dividend payments, even though an increase in the number of shares lowers each shareholder’s cut of profits.

Mr. Jain and Stefan Krause, the bank’s chief financial officer, portrayed the share issue as a turning point that would set the stage for the bank to focus less on its baggage from the financial crisis and more on growth and profit.

“We could see where a capital raise would bring us to the point where the capital issue was off the table,” Mr. Jain said.

European banks have as a rule taken longer to put the financial crisis behind them than American banks. The European lenders have had to deal with the burden of euro zone debt, but they also faced less pressure from regulators to confront their problems. Lately, though, there have been signs that some of the bigger banks are returning to health.

Investors had other good news to cheer from the bank this week. On Monday, the bank reported that net profit in the first quarter rose nearly 18 percent, to 1.66 billion euros, from 1.41 billion euros in the period a year earlier.

Though revenue rose a modest 2 percent, to 9.4 billion euros, the bank was able to cut costs. Mr. Krause said on the conference call that the bank expected to save about a billion euros over the full year.

Some analysts were still cautious about the bank’s long-term prospects. The bank faces uncertainty over the European economy, which is stuck in recession. It also continues to address an array of legal proceedings that could be costly to resolve.

“Whilst we still see risks from litigation, regulation and the macro environment, the strengthened capital position should put the group in a better position to deal with these challenges going forward,” analysts at Credit Suisse wrote in a note to clients. Credit Suisse upgraded Deutsche Bank shares to neutral, from underperform.

Deutsche Bank also said it would raise an additional 2 billion euros later in the year in the form of so-called hybrid equity, a form of debt that converts to shares in time of crisis and can thus be counted toward capital. The bank is waiting for German regulators to clarify rules for such instruments before it issues them.

As Cyprus Crisis Deepens, Wealthy Russians Are Ensnared

Much of that money, it so happens, flowed through Cyprus.

His rapid rise was as typical for a Russian oligarch as is his deep dependence on Cyprus for offshore banking. Working in part through Cypriot trusts, Mr. Rybolovlev, a former doctor, sold his gigantic potash fertilizer mining conglomerate after a tumultuous and lucrative run as owner and spirited the money abroad. Then the good times rolled.

In 2008, Mr. Rybolovlev, now 46, bought a Florida mansion from Donald Trump for $95 million. At the time, this was the most ever paid for a private residence in the United States. Almost as an afterthought, he complained it was in such poor repair that it could not be inhabited.

A few years later, Mr. Rybolovlev bought the most expensive apartment ever sold in New York from the family of the former Citigroup chairman Sanford I. Weill, paying $88 million for the penthouse at 15 Central Park West.

“Anyone who is a Russian oligarch and wants to make sure that, over the long term, his assets are protected wants to make sure those assets are out of Russia,” said David B. Newman, a partner at Day Pitney, a New York law firm representing Mr. Rybolovlev’s estranged wife, Elena, in a long-running divorce case. “If you are a friend of the government, you do very well, but if that relationship turns — and this can happen quickly — you want to be out of Russia.”

Today, this common practice among wealthy Russians like Mr. Rybolovlev — using Cyprus to worm their way into the global financial elite and to protect themselves if they should fall out of favor with the capricious President Vladimir V. Putin — has drawn the Russian government deeply into the negotiations for a bailout of Cyprus’s banking system, whether officials there like it or not.

Russian money flowing into Cypriot banks dwarfs the island’s $25 billion economy. About 25 percent of Russian foreign direct investment moves through Cyprus, according to an estimate by Morgan Stanley, frequently in a “round-trip” process that serves to lubricate the Russian economy. Cypriot entities, often owned by rich Russians, lent $40 billion a year to Russia from 2007 through 2011.

With a fortune estimated at $9.1 billion by Forbes magazine, Mr. Rybolovlev has reasons to worry about his status at home. But he is also the largest Russian investor in the Cypriot banking sector, which has given him a huge stake in preventing its collapse. As far back as July, Mr. Rybolovlev was negotiating to help recapitalize the Bank of Cyprus, according to Alithia, a newspaper based in the Cypriot capital, Nicosia.

At the same time, while Mr. Putin might not mind seeing Mr. Rybolovlev suffer a bit, he has an interest in protecting Russian wealth held abroad because of the role it plays at home and the opportunities it presents to expand Russian influence. If no bailout from the European Union is forthcoming and Cypriot banks collapse, the risk to Russian companies and oligarchs, some of them much closer to Mr. Putin than Mr. Rybolovlev is, would be far graver than the potential loss of deposited funds to the 9.9 percent “stabilization tax” originally proposed by the European Central Bank. At a minimum, capital controls could freeze all funds now in Cyprus.

The stakes are particularly high for wealthy Russians: Moody’s, the rating agency, has estimated that Russian deposits in banks and loans to Cypriot companies total $70 billion, or about 4 percent of Russia’s gross domestic product. Some 42 percent of the value of Cypriot bank deposits is in accounts with more than half a million euros.

As is typical for Russian oligarchs, Mr. Rybolovlev set up corporate trusts in Cyprus with breezy-sounding names like Aries and Virgo. These were little more than post-office boxes monitored by lawyers. But those trust accounts owned vast, gritty mining enterprises deep in the Russian hinterlands and filled up with countless riches as worries about global food shortages in the last decade sent fertilizer prices sky-high.

DealBook: JPMorgan Chase Inquiry Reveals Status Quo After Financial Crisis

Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York TimesSenator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

People have learned their lesson.

We’ve been told that so many times since the near-death experiences of the financial crisis. Bankers and regulators have flipped roles: now it’s the bankers who are cautious and their overseers who are aggressive.

Details of JPMorgan Chase’s multibillion-dollar trading loss — brought to light by a riveting and devastating report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations — demonstrate what a sham that is. Bankers aren’t acting cautious and chastened. Risk managers aren’t in the ascendance on Wall Street. Regulators remain their duped and docile selves.

What we now know about the incident is that, as the cliché has it, the cover-up was worse than the crime. The losses out of the London office weren’t enough to take down the bank. But as they were building, JPMorgan traders fiddled with risk measures and valuations. The bank’s risk managers defended the traders and pooh-poohed the flashing red signals. The bank gave incorrect information to its regulator. Top executives then made misleading statements to shareholders and the public. All the while, the regulator served its typical role of house pet.

As JPMorgan got into trouble, traders and the responsible executives treated the valuation of trading positions, made up of derivatives, as a puppet made to do what they wanted. The traders pulled on this calculation or that to change the way they were valuing the position to reduce the losses.

Ina Drew, the head of the bank’s chief investment office, referring to how the positions were calculated, asked an underling if he could “start getting a little bit of that mark back.” She then asked if he could “tweak at whatever it is I’m trying to show.” She might believe it is exculpatory that she prefaced the comment by saying to do it “if appropriate” and that the tweak should come with “demonstrable data,” but any idiot working for her would know exactly what she meant: create some rationale to manipulate the valuations to make things look better than they really are.

This discussion did not make it into the bank’s internal report on the incident from January. Imagine that.

Yes, Ms. Drew was ousted. But her actions show that what financial executives do postcrisis when faced with trouble is no different than what they did precrisis. In testimony on Friday, in a quiet voice, she deflected blame up to Mr. Dimon and down to her traders, claiming she was kept in the dark.

The Senate report makes it clear that JPMorgan misled shareholders and the public, particularly on its April 13, 2012, conference call.

That call, which makes up a particularly damning portion of the Senate report, featured a haughty Jamie Dimon famously dismissing the problem as a “tempest in a teapot.”

Of course, it was no such squall. In the call, the chief financial officer at the time, Douglas L. Braunstein, made a number of what appear to be misleading statements about the trades. Mr. Braunstein said the trading decisions were made on a very long-term basis, when in fact the traders were shuffling positions almost daily to make profits and then to disastrously “defend” their positions from further losses. Mr. Braunstein reassured investors and analysts in the call that the trades were vetted by the firm’s top risk managers, when they were not (though top officials, including Mr. Dimon, knew about repeated risk-measure breaches).

This means “there was risk oversight” for the office that made the trades, and the trading “positions needed to comply with limits,” a JPMorgan spokesman, Joseph Evangelisti, said. “We were not aware at the time of all the deficiencies in the risk organization” of the trading group.

In the conference call, Mr. Braunstein also said that the trades were “fully transparent to the regulators,” but, in fact, watchdogs didn’t receive any regular reporting of the positions and received specific information only days before the call.

“What Doug said was accurate,” Mr. Evangelisti said. “No one in senior management at that time believed there was a larger problem in the context of the firm’s size and scale.”

In JPMorgan’s internal report, the call receives scant attention. In testimony before Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Senate subcommittee, Mr. Braunstein fell back on the explanation that he was saying what he believed at the time.

Mr. Braunstein wasn’t available for comment, according to the bank.

Maybe regulators will think it notable that the chief financial officer of JPMorgan misled shareholders in his first extensive comments about the trading losses. Don’t hold your breath.

I don’t even expect much to come out of the evidence that the bank misled regulators. The bank stopped giving its regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, important information. At one point, the bank told the agency that it was reducing the size of its positions when it was actually increasing those positions, according to the Senate report.

Despite JPMorgan’s smoke screens, the regulators deserve the public humiliation they have received. They were alerted to risk-measure breaches that should have warned them of problems. By April 30, 2012, just weeks after the trading debacle came to light and before any serious investigation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency declared the matter closed, according to internal minutes from a meeting. (At Friday’s hearing, officials from the agency disputed that it was, in fact, closed.)

So, yes, people have learned their lessons, the real lessons of the financial crisis. JPMorgan repeated the same misdeeds that other banks successfully pulled off at the height of the financial crisis: mismarking portfolios of assets and misleading the public. This was condoned by regulators. Regulators and prosecutors have been averting their eyes for years from rotted bank assets and rotted bank morals; why would JPMorgan expect any different reaction in this case?

Mr. Dimon and JPMorgan executives have all publicly donned hair shirts to demonstrate their contrition. Mr. Dimon and Mr. Braunstein even took pay cuts, going from earning many millions to some fewer millions.

JPMorgan argues that Mr. Dimon and Mr. Braunstein told regulators and the public only what they believed at the time. Mr. Dimon and Mr. Braunstein made mistakes, but they quickly worked to clean them up, fire those responsible and change their ways. The losses were small relative to the size of the bank and, if anything, demonstrate the strength of JPMorgan’s diversified business. After all, the bank made record earnings last year.

But I suspect that if you dosed JPMorgan executives with Pentothal, they would reveal they believed all of this attention was a media creation and political showboating — still a “tempest in a teapot.”

“Not true,” Mr. Evangelisti, the JPMorgan spokesman, said. “We acknowledged from the outset that we made significant mistakes, and we have repeatedly apologized for them. We do not blame the media or regulators for these issues. This was our fault totally. All we can do now is fix the problems and learn from them.”

As has happened so often in the wake of the financial crisis, we are left with the spectacle of bankers — here the well-compensated Mr. Dimon and Mr. Braunstein — insisting that they were clueless and incompetent, which would shield them from any allegations of intent to defraud.

As for many longtime officials at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, they may well think that this was merely a nuanced mistake that calls for nothing more than careful suggestions of remedies that don’t harm the bank too much. The new head of the agency, Thomas J. Curry, has begun to clean house and re-energize the place, but the overhaul that is needed looks too big for one person.

So let’s take a moment to celebrate a handful of American heroes, Mr. Levin and the staff members at the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Because of them, this corruption has come to light. Friday’s hearing served to emphasize how lonely Mr. Levin’s efforts are. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and the new ranking minority member on the committee, did a yeoman’s job of asking a few questions. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, made a few incoherent statements using the au courant phrase “too big to fail,” then scuttled out of the hearing. None of the other senators, Democrats and Republicans alike, bothered to show up.

The 78-year-old Mr. Levin, peering over those glasses that seem surgically attached to the tip of his nose, soldiered on.

But let’s imagine what would happen if this report does what the senator hopes and puts pressure on the regulators to finish a simplified and loophole-free Volcker Rule, which would prohibit banks from making bets for their own profit using taxpayer-backed money. Why should we have the slightest confidence that big banks could be persuaded to follow it? And why should we feel reassured that, if they didn’t, regulators could or would enforce it?

We shouldn’t. And we don’t.

Off the Charts: In Europe, a Repeat of the Credit Crisis

In the euro area as a whole, the amount of credit outstanding has fallen to levels lower than they were a year ago, according to figures released last week by the European Central Bank. In some countries within the euro zone, including Italy and Spain, credit is falling at a faster rate now than it did during the first crisis.

The difficulty in obtaining credit seems likely to make it even harder for the countries that have been hurt the most to recover and begin to grow again. The figures show that while the E.C.B. has relieved the immediate financial pressures on both governments and banks by making it easy for them to borrow, it has not managed to extend that easy credit to those who need money the most.

The first of the accompanying charts shows 12-month changes in the amounts of loans outstanding in the 17 countries that make up the euro zone, and the lower charts show the state of lending in several of the countries. The bolder of the two lines in each chart shows the change in outstanding loans to nonfinancial companies, while the other line shows changes in total loans to households, a figure that includes both home mortgages and consumer loans.

In the middle of the last decade, loans were growing rapidly in many countries. Interest rates had fallen sharply as markets concluded there was no good reason for rates to be much higher in one euro zone country than another. After all, the currency risk was identical in all the countries.

In Ireland and Spain, the easy credit helped to finance large housing bubbles, which then burst during the crisis. In both of those countries, the amount of outstanding loans rose at a pace above 30 percent a year at the peak of the cycle.

A falling total of loans means that on a net basis, no new loans are being issued, although banks might be relending some of the money being repaid on old loans. In some cases, particularly in Ireland, the amount of loans outstanding has plunged not because loans are being repaid but because they are being written off.

Some countries seem unaffected. In Finland, which has been among the most vocal in demanding austerity in the troubled countries, the amount of loans outstanding continues to grow at a rate of more than 5 percent a year. In Austria and Germany, loan volume is also rising, although at a slower rate.

But in Portugal, the amount of corporate loans outstanding is now lower than it was in the spring of 2008, before the collapse of Lehman Brothers sent world credit markets tumbling. In Ireland, loan totals to both companies and households have fallen to 2005 levels.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.

DealBook: European Private Equity Firms Seek Nontraditional Loans Amid Debt Crisis

LONDON — As the sovereign debt crisis has slammed Europe, Cinven has had to get creative to finance buyouts.

When the London-based private equity firm wanted to buy CPA Global this year for $1.5 billion, Cinven looked beyond banks, the usual source of money. Along with debt from HSBC and JPMorgan Chase, it secured almost $200 million of higher-interest loans from nontraditional lenders. It also had to spend roughly $600 million of its own cash.

“The debt markets have been challenging since 2007,” said Matthew Sabben-Clare, a partner at Cinven. “There’s a degree of selectivity by the banks over geographies and certain industries. Banks are more regionally focused than before.”

Europe’s financial woes are forcing private equity firms like Cinven to revise their deal-making playbooks.

As banks pull back, private equity firms are increasingly turning to high-yield bonds, mezzanine loans and other types of debt that carry higher interest rates. Some are appealing directly to institutional investors like pensions and sovereign wealth funds to finance specific deals.

Given the tight credit, most firms are having to put up more capital to get deals done. Cash now accounts for more than 50 percent of the average European buyout, according to the data provider S.&.P. Capital I.Q. Five years ago, that number was 33 percent. In the United States, cash represents 38 percent of the average buyout, mainly because firms have access to a variety of financing options, like capital markets.

Private equity firms “are having to widen the net to find the loan financing they need,” said Kristian Orssten, head of European high-yield and loan capital markets at JPMorgan Chase in London. “Many lenders in Europe are getting to grips with their own funding challenges.”

The financing troubles for buyouts are reflected in the weak deal-making environment.

Although firms are raising money to buy distressed assets in Europe, many have remained on the sidelines as the debt crisis continues. So far this year, European acquisitions by private equity firms have totaled $23.2 billion, a 38 percent decline from the same period in 2011, according to Thomson Reuters.

Firms have pulled some deals altogether, fearing that asset prices could fall even further. After months of negotiations, Blackstone and BC Partners dropped their $3.2 billion bid for the frozen-food company Iglo after failing to come to terms with its private equity owner, Permira, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter who declined to speak publicly.

In  good times, European buyout firms relied heavily on cheap bank lending. Flush with cash, the Continent’s financial institutions provided almost 80 percent of financing on deals, often keeping the debt on their own balance sheets instead of selling it off to other investors.

But as the debt crisis worsened, banks curbed their lending in an effort to meet stricter capital requirements, which penalize firms for holding risky investments like debt connected to private equity deals. Firms like Deutsche Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland have sold loans at a discount to other investors to shed unwanted assets.

Even when banks are willing to finance deals, they are limiting their bets. Local banks are focusing mostly on deals in their home countries, and they are often willing to finance only a portion of the buyouts.

As a result, private equity firms are often tapping multiple lenders, even when the costs of a buyout are less than $1 billion. To finance its £465 million ($749 million) acquisition of the British company Mercury Pharma, Cinven capitalized on its 20-year relationships with certain banks, securing £235 million of financing from a consortium of firms, including Lloyds Banking Group.

With banks being selective, private equity firms have had to tap other markets.

High-yield debt investors, in search of better yields, have been receptive. The European private equity firm Apax issued almost $1 billion of high-yield bonds in February as part of its $2.1 billion acquisition of the telecommunications company Orange Switzerland. Intelsat, one of the world’s largest satellite operators, owned by a BC Partners-led group, raised $1.2 billion this year in an effort to refinance its debt.

“The high-yield market in Europe is exploding,” said a partner from a leading European private equity firm, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s attracting a lot of institutional investors who are chasing high returns.” The amount of European high-yield bonds connected to investments from private equity firms has risen 49 percent, to $13.5 billion, since 2007, according to the data provider Dealogic.

Private equity firms are also stepping in to fill the void. The Scandinavian firm EQT Partners turned to a consortium of financial players, including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, for around $510 million of mezzanine financing for its $2.3 billion acquisition of the German medical supplies company BSN Medical in June.

“As bank funding has become more expensive, it has opened up an opportunity for new types of financing,” said Sachin Date, head of private equity for Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa at the accounting firm Ernst & Young in London.

But such debt carries its own set of risks. Generally, loans from nontraditional lenders carry higher interest rates, which can be costly for companies, especially in the current economic conditions. If the financial burden became too high, it could force borrowers to default on their loans and exacerbate the region’s woes.

“The crisis has hit much harder than people had expected,” said Nicolas de Nazelle, a managing partner at the private equity adviser Triago in Paris.

As Economic Crisis Drags On, Firms in Spain Reshape Their Practices

Call it a sign of the times. In May the Spanish government announced the results of its beauty contest for legal work on a €35 billion emergency fund designed to reduce regional government debt. Bidders for the work, which involved setting up the legal framework for the banks to disperse the funds to unpaid suppliers, included Spain's three largest firms --Cuatrecasas, Goncalves Pereira; Garrigues; and Uria Menendez -- and at least one Magic Circle firm, Clifford Chance. While it wasn't surprising that Cuatrecasas, one of the oldest operating law firms in the Iberian market, ended up winning the work, what is shocking is the firm's suggested fee: €1.

That wasn't a fluke. Uria Menendez also volunteered to do the work for €1, and Garrigues and Clifford Chance offered reduced fees in an effort to land the prestigious assignment, which could lead to more work from the Spanish government. "Given the economic situation, we felt it was the right thing to do as a service to the government," says Cuatrecasas corporate partner Federico Roig. (Uria declined to comment. Garrigues and Clifford Chance confirmed that they offered a reduced fee, but say that it was a reasonable one.)

The economic crisis in Spain is now in its fifth year and shows little sign of abating soon. The country's banking system, which accounts for 20 percent of Spain's $1.49 trillion GDP, is on the brink of insolvency and will require up to a €100 billion ($123 billion) bailout from the European Union. And in order to comply with the E.U.'s conditions for the bailout funds, in July Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy proposed an austerity plan that would raise the Value Added Tax (VAT) on goods and services by 3 percent -- increasing it to 21 percent -- while also cutting unemployment benefits and reducing civil servants' pay. Although the Spanish government clearly needed to take action to reduce the country's deficit, the measures could stifle consumer spending and thus deepen the recession.

The prolonged downturn has affected law firms in the Iberian market, particularly those whose client base is primarily comprised of large Spanish companies. Although there's been an uptick in labor, tax, litigation and insolvency work in Spain and Portugal, financing and mergers and acquisition work has slowed ­dramatically.

At the three biggest Spanish firms, revenues from 2010 to 2011 increased only incrementally. Garrigues, the largest of the triumvirate, posted revenue of €355 million ($495 million) last year, up just 1 percent from 2010. Cuatrecasas' revenue saw a meager 0.4 percent increase during the same time period, with revenue of €241.7 million ($321 million) in 2010 and €242.6 million ($338 million) in 2011. And Uria Menendez reported a 1.5 percent increase last year, with revenue of €188 million ($262 million).

This year, things are looking even bleaker. Garrigues, the only firm in the region whose fiscal year ends on August 31, expects that its revenue will be down 2 percent to 3 percent for 2012. Global firms that work in the region, such as Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Baker & McKenzie, Clifford Chance, and Jones Day, have been affected as well. While none of these firms disclose revenue figures for Spain, lawyers at the firms nonetheless admit that the crisis has affected their practice in the region.

In order to compensate for the loss of revenues from lucrative practice areas like M&A, firms have had to make critical changes: reducing operating costs, more actively managing their lawyers' practices, restructuring compensation plans, and -- in some cases -- reducing their head counts. "We increased our numbers [between 2000 and 2008] because the economy was booming and we thought it would continue," says Garrigues managing partner Fernando Vives. "So now we've had to reduce and adapt our workforce."

Although the 10 lawyers interviewed for this article were publicly stoic about Spain's economic crisis, in private conversations they were clearly worried about the effects of a continued downturn on their firms and their country. Nearly all expressed hope that the economy had bottomed out and would begin to turn around this fall. "We are facing the crisis more optimistically now, but not naively so," says Freshfields' managing partner for Spain, Inaki Gabilondo.

From the late 1990s until 2007, Spain had the fastest-growing economy in the European Union. The country experienced a decade­long real estate boom; at its peak in 2007, construction accounted for 16 percent of the GDP. The thriving real estate market, coupled with a high volume of leveraged buyout and M&A deals, attracted U.S. and U.K. law firms to the region, and spurred the growth of domestic firms within Spain and abroad. Spanish M&A activity more than doubled from 2003 to 2007, and the value of the deals peaked at $194 billion in 2007. But then came the downturn, fueled by the collapse of the real estate market in 2008, which in turn resulted in the crash of the cajas, the small Spanish savings banks that were heavy on home mortgages and have little access to capital since they aren't publicly traded.

The majority of the 45 cajas were forced to merge -- there are now just 14 -- and this helped generate enough work for big firms in Spain to weather the recession. But that work is drying up, and over the past five years M&A activity has declined steeply. "It's not a good time for corporate transactions. There aren't any takeovers or acquisitions," says Jose Maria Alonso, the head of Baker & Mc­Kenzie's dispute resolution team in Madrid and the former managing partner at Garrigues. Alonso cites two large deals that have been put on hold because of the crisis: the privatization of Spanish airport operator Aeropuertos Espanoles y Navegacion Aerea (AENA), and the initial public offering of lottery operator Loterias y Apuestas del Estado (LAE), which would have been the largest IPO in Spanish history.

As Economic Crisis Drags On, Firms in Spain Reshape Their Practices

Call it a sign of the times. In May the Spanish government announced the results of its beauty contest for legal work on a €35 billion emergency fund designed to reduce regional government debt. Bidders for the work, which involved setting up the legal framework for the banks to disperse the funds to unpaid suppliers, included Spain's three largest firms --Cuatrecasas, Goncalves Pereira; Garrigues; and Uria Menendez -- and at least one Magic Circle firm, Clifford Chance. While it wasn't surprising that Cuatrecasas, one of the oldest operating law firms in the Iberian market, ended up winning the work, what is shocking is the firm's suggested fee: €1.

That wasn't a fluke. Uria Menendez also volunteered to do the work for €1, and Garrigues and Clifford Chance offered reduced fees in an effort to land the prestigious assignment, which could lead to more work from the Spanish government. "Given the economic situation, we felt it was the right thing to do as a service to the government," says Cuatrecasas corporate partner Federico Roig. (Uria declined to comment. Garrigues and Clifford Chance confirmed that they offered a reduced fee, but say that it was a reasonable one.)

The economic crisis in Spain is now in its fifth year and shows little sign of abating soon. The country's banking system, which accounts for 20 percent of Spain's $1.49 trillion GDP, is on the brink of insolvency and will require up to a €100 billion ($123 billion) bailout from the European Union. And in order to comply with the E.U.'s conditions for the bailout funds, in July Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy proposed an austerity plan that would raise the Value Added Tax (VAT) on goods and services by 3 percent -- increasing it to 21 percent -- while also cutting unemployment benefits and reducing civil servants' pay. Although the Spanish government clearly needed to take action to reduce the country's deficit, the measures could stifle consumer spending and thus deepen the recession.

The prolonged downturn has affected law firms in the Iberian market, particularly those whose client base is primarily comprised of large Spanish companies. Although there's been an uptick in labor, tax, litigation and insolvency work in Spain and Portugal, financing and mergers and acquisition work has slowed ­dramatically.

At the three biggest Spanish firms, revenues from 2010 to 2011 increased only incrementally. Garrigues, the largest of the triumvirate, posted revenue of €355 million ($495 million) last year, up just 1 percent from 2010. Cuatrecasas' revenue saw a meager 0.4 percent increase during the same time period, with revenue of €241.7 million ($321 million) in 2010 and €242.6 million ($338 million) in 2011. And Uria Menendez reported a 1.5 percent increase last year, with revenue of €188 million ($262 million).

This year, things are looking even bleaker. Garrigues, the only firm in the region whose fiscal year ends on August 31, expects that its revenue will be down 2 percent to 3 percent for 2012. Global firms that work in the region, such as Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Baker & McKenzie, Clifford Chance, and Jones Day, have been affected as well. While none of these firms disclose revenue figures for Spain, lawyers at the firms nonetheless admit that the crisis has affected their practice in the region.

In order to compensate for the loss of revenues from lucrative practice areas like M&A, firms have had to make critical changes: reducing operating costs, more actively managing their lawyers' practices, restructuring compensation plans, and -- in some cases -- reducing their head counts. "We increased our numbers [between 2000 and 2008] because the economy was booming and we thought it would continue," says Garrigues managing partner Fernando Vives. "So now we've had to reduce and adapt our workforce."

Although the 10 lawyers interviewed for this article were publicly stoic about Spain's economic crisis, in private conversations they were clearly worried about the effects of a continued downturn on their firms and their country. Nearly all expressed hope that the economy had bottomed out and would begin to turn around this fall. "We are facing the crisis more optimistically now, but not naively so," says Freshfields' managing partner for Spain, Inaki Gabilondo.

From the late 1990s until 2007, Spain had the fastest-growing economy in the European Union. The country experienced a decade­long real estate boom; at its peak in 2007, construction accounted for 16 percent of the GDP. The thriving real estate market, coupled with a high volume of leveraged buyout and M&A deals, attracted U.S. and U.K. law firms to the region, and spurred the growth of domestic firms within Spain and abroad. Spanish M&A activity more than doubled from 2003 to 2007, and the value of the deals peaked at $194 billion in 2007. But then came the downturn, fueled by the collapse of the real estate market in 2008, which in turn resulted in the crash of the cajas, the small Spanish savings banks that were heavy on home mortgages and have little access to capital since they aren't publicly traded.

The majority of the 45 cajas were forced to merge -- there are now just 14 -- and this helped generate enough work for big firms in Spain to weather the recession. But that work is drying up, and over the past five years M&A activity has declined steeply. "It's not a good time for corporate transactions. There aren't any takeovers or acquisitions," says Jose Maria Alonso, the head of Baker & Mc­Kenzie's dispute resolution team in Madrid and the former managing partner at Garrigues. Alonso cites two large deals that have been put on hold because of the crisis: the privatization of Spanish airport operator Aeropuertos Espanoles y Navegacion Aerea (AENA), and the initial public offering of lottery operator Loterias y Apuestas del Estado (LAE), which would have been the largest IPO in Spanish history.