With the exits coinciding with some senior retirements/management moves at firms such as Linklaters and Freshfields, the impact of the departures could be magnified, not only on the firms they are joining but also on those they are leaving.
Latham, meanwhile, picked up Freshfields’ rising star Sam Newhouse in April last year in a busy month that also saw the firm hire two other corporate partners from non-Magic Circle firms. Toms joined Skadden a few months after his former A&O colleague George Knighton, although both were hired at the same time. Weil and Skadden have both picked up two laterals apiece in the shape of David Avery-Gee (ex Linklaters) and Murray Cox (a rare partner exit from Slaughter and May) at Weil, and Bruce Embley (Freshfields) and Simon Toms (A&O) at Skadden.
#THE MAGIC CIRCLE TORRENT FULL#
Since January 2020, US or transatlantic firms have hired nine M&A partners in London (see box below) and a full five of these have joined leading US firms from the Magic Circle, with one, Philip Cheveley, joining Shearman & Sterling from Travers Smith. “Each of our partner hires has been a success and it has given us increasing confidence in our strategy and, in turn, has made us a more attractive proposition to laterals.”īut the latest shift in focus and therefore the potential new risk to UK firms comes from the US firms which are now trying to grow their plc client base – a move which, if successful, would mean attempting to take on the UK’s top players on home ground. Surging levels of PE-driven M&A (PE investment hit its highest global total since the financial crisis in 2020 at $608.7bn according to Mergermarket) mean it has already been possible for US firms like Kirkland to climb UK and European M&A league tables without deviating from their PE-focused client base. (The latter perhaps challenged recently by the departure of Patrick Sarch to relaunch the M&A team at Hogan Lovells and the imminent departure of Ian Bagshaw.) US firms’ corporate ambitions in the City have tended to fall into three camps – those, like Kirkland and Simpson Thacher, which have aggressively and very successfully targeted the financial sponsor market those like Sullivan & Cromwell, Cleary Gottlieb and Davis Polk, that have made one or two good hires to develop small but high-quality practices advising mainly US corporates/financial adviser clients and finally, those like Latham and White & Case which have been trying to build something closer in form to a UK firm. However, recent lateral hiring, backed up by deal data, suggests that in a booming M&A market enjoying record levels of activity – a full quarter of which is being driven by PE – this position may be about to change. Having pushed remuneration packages up to eye-watering seven or eight figure sums for the most coveted names, their extensive hiring sprees and growing dominance in areas such as PE and leverage finance have been well documented.īut, to date, they have largely been unable to replicate that success in the City’s highly competitive premium public M&A market, where relationships are held far tighter and the need for scale has tended to exclude all but the biggest UK players.Īfter all, if firms as established as CC and Allen & Overy (A&O) remain unable to break into the very top echelon of M&A advisers in the minds of some, what hope is there for US upstarts, even if they have been in the City for 30 years or so? On the face of it, there’s nothing new about the top US firms’ assault on the City legal market. In my view, in the same way that a range of top UK firms have fallen behind the Magic Circle, it’s inevitable that the Magic Circle will end up falling behind the US firms for global M&A.’ ‘The same hasn’t happened in M&A yet but nearly all of the top US firms here are now trying to build it. Look at private equity (PE) – that used to be dominated by Clifford Chance (CC), Freshfields and Ashurst but now it’s US firms,’ warns Weil London head Mike Francies.
0 kommentar(er)
