"[3] Later that year, The The Globe & Mail reported the Seven Sisters term was no longer valid, explaining that "as the Canadian pool of major companies boils down to a thin concentrate, the upper legal tier has also shrunk."
It noted that "most observers agree the reigning top players are McCarthy Tétrault, Stikeman Elliott, Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt and Blake, Cassels & Graydon.
Thus far, Canadian partnerships had been limited in their ability to practice law outside their home provinces; the Sisters, for the most part, had operated as single-office corporate boutiques.
[12][13][14][15] Shortly thereafter, a subclass of the Seven Sisters decided to expand nationally by greenfielding offices in the 1990s (i.e. Osler and Blakes from Toronto, Stikeman Elliott from Montreal, and Bennett Jones from Calgary), setting off a corresponding wave of combinations among regional law firms.
[16][17][18][19][20][21] These amalgamations were concentrated about a group of national mergers at the turn of the millennium (i.e. Fasken Martineau DuMoulin, Borden Ladner Gervais, and Gowling LaFleur Henderson[22][23][24][25]) and then a succession of international mergers following the 2007–2008 financial crisis (i.e. Ogilvy Renault and Mcleod Dixon with Norton Rose and Fraser Milner Casgrain with Dentons[26][27][28][29]), creating a new class of well-resourced competitors to the Sisters.
The LTMX integration offered Toronto and London's leading capital markets' advisors — namely the Seven Sisters and the Magic Circle — with their own opportunities to merge and form trans-Atlantic champions better able to compete with New York's legal powerhouses.
In 2013, The Lawyer reported that another Magic Circle firm Linklaters would not expand its "alliance" into Canada, even though it had entered the Australian market the previous year.
Freshfields successfully managed to enter the highly competitive U.S. corporate bar through greenfields, while Allen & Overy completed a precedent-setting, trans-Atlantic merger with New York-founded Shearman & Sterling in 2024.