Purse gets top finance job at Clifford Chance

STEPHEN PURSE has been recruited as the new finance director of Clifford Chance, the world's biggest law firm.

He will step down as finance director of Management Consulting Group (MCG), the £100m Stock Exchange-listed company, to join the lawyers who boast revenues of £900m-plus a year.

Purse, 51, leaves MCG after it announces full-year results in early March to join Clifford Chance during a period of massive shake-up as its UK bosses try to screw better profits from its US arm.

Peter Cornell, the British global managing partner, recently decided to quit the firm's Canary Wharf headquarters and rebase himself in New York to focus on the US operations which account for around a quarter of the firm's revenues - but supposedly much less of its profits.

Purse joined MCG in April 2000 becoming finance director a year later.

Like many of MCG's management he trained as an acccountant at KPMG where he qualified in 1977. He was finance director of the listed nursing homes group Westminster-Healthcare between 1998 and 2000.

His arrival at Clifford Chance will reinforce the firm's determination to leave lawyers to practise law and bring in professional managersto run the business. Ever since its takeover of New York's Rogers & Wells in 2000, Clifford Chance has struggled to make a major impact in the US.

At MCG, Purse will be replaced by Mark Currie, another KPMG partner who was a top man in Guy Hands' Principal Finance group at Nomura - one of the most aggressive private equity houses of the 1990s.