Americas
Law firms ushered in 2015 with a spate of lateral hires. KING & SPALDING bolstered its cross-border transactional capability with the addition of Ye Cecilia Hong, who was previously a partner at Kirkland & Ellis. New York-based Hong, fluent in Mandarin Chinese as well as English, advises public and private borrowers and lenders on multijurisdictional distressed financings and restructurings.
As the race for dominance of Latin American deals heats up, one of the latest firms to snag a cross-border acquisition financing and project financing specialist is JONES DAY, which lured Fradyn Suárez from Hunton & Williams in Miami. Suárez specialises in representing private equity clients looking to invest in Latin America’s markets, and her expertise also encompasses bond offerings, syndicated lending and restructuring transactions.
Elsewhere BAKER BOTTS lured the head of Goodwin Procter’s financial restructuring practice, Emanuel “Manny” Grillo, to the firm’s office in Manhattan. Grillo represents creditors, debtors, trustees, buyers, and sellers in international restructurings.
WILLKIE FARR & GALLAGHER, which had hired James Burns from the SEC in October, made a further hire on the asset management and regulatory front in Washington with the recruitment of James Anderson, who had been chair of the investment management practice at WilmerHale. Anderson has advised hedge funds, mutual funds, broker-dealers, banks and investment advisors on transactional and compliance matters for over two decades.
Another hire in the financial services regulatory arena came with MILLER & CHEVALIER’s luring of Erin Sweeney from Dickstein Shapiro in the capital. Sweeney is an expert on Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance and has first-hand experience in the drafting of regulations affecting investment managers and mutual funds, dating from her tenure at the Department of Labour from 2003 to 2007.
Just before the New Year, DORSEY & WHITNEY lured US Bancorp senior vice president and deputy general counsel Nicholas Vlietstra back to the firm. Vlietstra, who has worked extensively with regulators at the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, was a Dorsey & Whitney associate from 1994 to 1999.
DENTONS hired a bank regulatory partner with significant transactional expertise in the form of Lloyd Winans, a former general counsel at Lehman Brothers and a former managing counsel for Citibank’s Latin America Consumer Bank. Winans advises financial institutions on compliance and enforcement matters and handles asset-backed security transactions and leasing work with a Central or South American component. He has worked on prepaid commodity transactions in Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru.
Asia/Pacific
It’s been a busy month in Hong Kong as the Bingham McCutchen saga finally came to a close. Vincent Sum joined MAYER BROWN JSM after a period of being the city’s last partner standing at the now defunct firm. In late 2014 there had been a six-partner exodus from the U.S. outfit with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld the beneficiary.
Elsewhere in Hong Kong CADWALADER WICKERSHAM & TAFT raided Latham & Watkins’s corporate team and brought in partners Michael Liu, Stephen Chan and Jane Ng. Liu was co-chair of the firm’s Greater China Practice and was previously the managing partner of its Hong Kong office.
Down Under, SQUIRE PATTON BOGGS brought in one of Australia’s leading restructuring, insolvency and litigation partners, Amanda Banton. Banton, who was a partner at Piper Alderman, joined the firm’s Sydney office with a team of 11 lawyers.
In Japan, MORRISON & FOERSTER strengthened its M&A practice by hiring a new M&A and securities lawyer to its corporate practice. James Robinson arrived at the firm from Herbert Smith Freehills where he had previously led its Tokyo M&A practice. Elsewhere Greenberg Traurig launched a new office - GREENBERG TRAURIG HORITSU JIMUSHO - in Tokyo with three hires from DLA Piper and White & Case. Koji Ishikawa joined from DLA Piper, and new co-chairs Yuji Ogiwara and Koichiro Ohashi joined from White & Case.
In Singapore GIBSON DUNN & CRUTCHER hired finance partner Christopher James Thomas from White & Case, while REED SMITH launched its corporate practice through the addition of partner Matt Gorman. Gorman joined from Stephenson Harwood where he acted as head of corporate at the firm’s South East Asia practice.
Elsewhere ASEAN group chairman Simon Makinson relocated from ALLEN & OVERY’s Bangkok office to Yangon in Myanmar; while in India, AZB & Partners former CEO Abhijit Joshi launched VERITUS LEGAL alongside fellow AZB partner Nandish Vyas. WADIA GHANDY & CO meanwhile reinforced its ranks with the hire of former ALMT Legal partner Subashini Radhakrishnan.
Europe, Middle East and Africa
In Belgium one of the leading competition partners at Clifford Chance, EU public policy head and former global head of antitrust Oliver Bretz, has left the firm. He plans to set up a boutique competition practice based in Brussels and London. According to reports he plans to have a team of at least three associates in place by the end of 2015.
One hire to raise a few eyebrows in Czech Republic was that of White & Case’s CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) head, who also led its Prague capital markets practice, Květoslav Krejčí, the fifth partner to leave the white shoe firm’s Czech team in the last 18 months. He was poached by KINSTELLAR’s rival office in the city.
The French market was relatively quiet with the Christmas period heralding a stream of promotion announcements rather than lateral-hires. Among the bigger moves however was Olivier Diaz’s departure from Darrois Villey Maillot Brochier in December 2014 to the Paris office of SKADDEN ARPS SLATE MEAGHER & FLOM. Diaz is one of the best known corporate and M&A lawyers in the French market, especially for public M&A, and was a co-managing partner at Darrois.
Pascal Jouannic joined the DENTONS banking and finance team as a partner, having previously practiced as counsel at Allen & Overy (A&O). Jouannic had joined A&O in 2001 and specialises in structured finance and asset-backed securitisation with particular experience in trade receivables and automotive assets.
In January, M&A lawyer Yannick Piette moved from Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer to WEIL GOTSHAL & MANGES and OSBORNE CLARKE continued its expansion adding a sixth partner in the form of M&A specialist David Haccoun from Baker & McKenzie.
Lastly, Gilles Kolifrath moved from Axa France to KRAMER LEVIN. Kolifrath was a member of ISDA for over a decade and specialises in banking and finance, regulatory, financial instruments such as derivatives, insurance, restructuring and bank litigation.
Christmas and public holidays meant it was an uncharacteristically quiet period for the German legal market. In early December however there was a significant hire when ALLEN & OVERY recruited Shearman & Sterling's most prominent German capital markets partner, Marc Plepelits, in Frankfurt. The U.S.-qualified lawyer has established an excellent reputation for U.S. capital markets equity and debt, including high-yield, advice since joining Shearman’s Frankfurt office in 2000. He was bought in to replace the magic circle firm’s former Frankfurt partner and head of U.S. issues, Gernot Wagner, who joined White & Case’s German offering last September.
A more recent German lateral move saw managing director and partner at MCF Corporate, Christoph Stoecker, join DLA PIPER as an of counsel in Hamburg. Stoecker, who is an M&A specialist, will continue in his previous role in addition to advising for DLA’s clients.
In Zurich, Peter Ackermann left BILL & ISSENEGGER (formerly Bill Isenegger Ackermann) to take the role of general counsel at an independent asset manager. Ackermann specialises in commercial transactions and has been a partner in the firm since 1990.
In December and the first half of January London lateral hire news was dominated by KIRKLAND & ELLIS. First off the firm witnessed the departure of banking and finance partner Stephen Gillespie to GIBSON DUNN & CRUTCHER. Gillespie had originally joined from Allen & Overy in 2006 and the move was the latest in a series of English law hires made by Gibson Dunn, which included Charlie Geffen, Nigel Stacey, Jonathan Earle and Mark Sperotto from Ashurst.
This development was followed in January by the announcement that Kirkland’s former London managing partner Jim Learner was returning to the firm after a two-year stint at private equity firm HGGC in Palo Alto in the U.S. Learner was one of the key figures in the establishment of Kirkland's London base in 1994 and spent 25 years at the U.S. firm in his first stint.
January also saw a new entrant in the London market with the opening of an office by U.S. outfit COOLEY. The firm hired 19 partners overall from Edwards Wildman and Morrison & Foerster (MoFo) for the launch. In the financial and corporate sphere the relevant hires were a trio of corporate M&A specialists from MoFo in the form of David Bresnick, Edward Lukins and the U.S. firm’s London corporate head Justin Stock who will lead Cooley’s new office.
Other moves included FRIED FRANK HARRIS SHRIVER & JACOBSON’s hire of private equity partner Daniel Oates from O'Melveny & Myers where he had led the London M&A team; SQUIRE PATTON BOGGS’ acquisition of finance partner John Hayward from Simmons & Simmons where he had been a partner in the corporate banking team; and the move of derivatives partner Daniel Franks to NORTON ROSE FULBRIGHT from Field Fisher Waterhouse.
Across the Middle East several new relationships and firms were formed in December and early January. U.S. outfit BROWN RUDNICK entered into non-exclusive associations with two Middle East firms, Hikmat Fayad & Associates and Nasser & Associates, which are both based in Lebanon with offices in Dubai.
Another firm to make changes in the Emirates was local firm GALADARI & ASSOCIATES which opened an office in Dubai’s free zone, the DIFC (Dubai International Financial Centre), taking its office numbers in the UAE to four. The new base will focus on international transactions and domestic litigation and dispute resolution.
Elsewhere DLA Piper’s Middle East head, Abdul Aziz Al-Yaqout, quit and opened Kuwait boutique MEYSAN PARTNERS with a MENA (Middle East and North Africa) general counsel from Carlyle, Bader El-Jeaan. The five-lawyer firm, which hopes to expand to 20 by the end of the year, will be based in the Gulf state but have a regional focus, covering a variety of financial and corporate work.
Israel’s legal market witnessed further consolidation in January when Tel Aviv firms Tadmor & Co and Yuval Levy & Co merged. The new offering, snappily named TADMOR & CO YUVAL LEVY & CO, has a team of 85 lawyers who will handle a range of transactional and contentious commercial work.
Finally in Africa CLIFFORD CHANCE boosted its team in Casablanca with the addition of M&A lawyer Franck Coudert, who had previously been with Reed Smith’s Paris office.