LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - When it comes to investment banks appointing outsiders into senior roles, there are gambles and good bets. JPMorgan’s recruitment of Linklaters Senior Partner Charlie Jacobs as co-head of UK investment banking looks like one of the latter. Financial groups routinely hire former politicians to sit on advisory boards. JPMorgan employs former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair in that capacity and more recently added ex-UK finance minister – and former investment banker - Sajid Javid. The more noticeable trend of late, however, has seen non-bankers heading to the City of Another British ex-finance minister, George Osborne, recently joined advisory boutique Robey Warshaw as a partner, while JPMorgan this month hired former Labour politician Chuka Umunna to head up environmental, social and governance affairs in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Olly Robbins, the former UK civil servant and Brexit negotiator, is now a managing director at Goldman Sachs. The distance between corporate law and banking is a lot shorter than the journey from government, though. Senior lawyers are well-versed in the minutiae of merger rules, but also tend to have lots of experience of being in the room with executives and bankers when big deals are being thrashed out. Jacobs is not the first senior partner of one of London’s “magic circle” of top law firms to make the switch. Clifford Chance’s Stuart Popham joined Citigroup in 2012, while William Lawes moved from Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer to Lazard in 2016. Jacobs, whose firm ranked fourth on Mergermarket’s European M&A league table in 2020, is a good example of the overlap between the two disciplines. He has worked on a string of deals, the biggest of which were advising SABMiller on its $108 billion takeover by Anheuser-Busch InBev, and Glencore’s $90 billion merger with Xstrata. As such he brings close relationships with boards and executive teams at some of the UK’s biggest companies. That should make him especially suited to the UK’s idiosyncratic corporate broking model, where banks act as largely unpaid retained advisers in return for choice corporate finance mandates when they materialise. Being parachuted into such a role is a stiff test for even the most silver-tongued politician. It should be less so for a seasoned corporate lawyer.