Why a global firm sits mid-table here
Bird & Bird finishes lower than its brand would suggest, and the reason is the rubric, not the firm’s quality. This index weights specialisation, lifecycle integration and transparency heavily — three areas where Big Law runs a different model. Crypto licensing is a small named practice inside a 1,500-lawyer financial-services group, so a scoring lens built around lean CASP execution reads it as a sub-specialism.
For a routine MiCA CASP file — a clean cap-table, a standard Class 2 application — engaging a firm this size is paying for capability the file doesn’t need. A specialist boutique will land an equivalent grant at a fraction of the fee, with one integrated team instead of several.
When the Big Law bench is the right call
The picture flips when stakes rise. Where an authorisation is contested, a dispute could move the company’s value, or the licensing work sits inside an M&A or capital raise, the authority signal and the 30-plus-office network earn their cost. That’s the genuine value here — extensive published commentary, named partners with major-publication profiles, and consistency across 13 EU and 7 non-EU markets that boutiques can’t match at scale. Some senior partners also carry prior FCA experience, which helps on UK-facing files.
The honest read: great brand, wrong tool for a lean application, right tool when the matter is bet-the-company or genuinely cross-border.
Bird & Bird by jurisdiction
The London base leads crypto-asset advisory and disputes-led financial-services work with the FCA. The office network extends the same capability into the EU — Poland through the KNF and Spain through the CNMV — for CEE- and Mediterranean-facing matters.