London headcount: 73 lawyers, 20 partners
Lawyer headcount change since 2013: +52%
London heads: Alistair Maughan and Jonathan Wheeler, office co-managing partners; Paul Friedman, Europe managing partner
Office specialities: M&A; restructuring; litigation; finance
Representative work: Advised SoftBank on a $6bn investment into WeWork; advised GLP on the formation of two European funds for $4bn; represented Benedikt Sobotka, chief executive of mining company Eurasian Resources Group, in connection with a Serious Fraud Office arrest warrant.
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Slowly developing under the radar for years, Morrison & Foerster (MoFo)’s London base made a rare acquaintance with the headlines in February with the recruitment of high-profile finance partner Christopher Kandel (pictured), Latham & Watkins’ banking co-chair.
Part of a four-partner team that joined Latham from White & Case in 2010, MoFo was hardly the obvious choice for the deal finance veteran to make his next move. But that is apparently part of what won him over after a four-month conversation with the firm. ‘What I have done most of my career is build things,’ says Kandel. ‘And being able to build something starting with a blank sheet is really exciting.’
The third finance partner to join the firm in less than a year after Benoit Lavigne from Ropes & Gray and Caroline Jury from Clifford Chance, Kandel is adamant that MoFo is positioned to be a credible force in Europe’s acquisition finance scene, backed by ‘a good M&A practice and a serious restructuring practice’.
While the development of its City restructuring team dates back to the hire of practice head Howard Morris from Dentons in 2013, the emergence of its London M&A group speaks to more recent phase.
MoFo had lost the bulk of its London corporate team in January 2015, with five partners, including practice head Justin Stock, quitting for West Coast rival Cooley’s newly-launched London base.
‘Being able to build something starting with a blank sheet is really exciting.’
Christopher Kandel, Morrison & Foerster
Veteran litigator and executive committee member, Paul Friedman, had moved to London a few weeks before to take up the newly-created role of Europe managing partner, but all that was left in the M&A team was three associates.
Friedman’s relocation from San Francisco was part of a push by MoFo chair Larren Nashelsky to ensure more collaboration between its European bases in London, Berlin and Brussels and the rest of the firm. ‘Our first priority was to build the M&A practice, because we have an exceptional M&A practice firm-wide and a number of clients globally,’ says Friedman.
That’s when the firm turned to Latham for the first in a long series of hires. Latham’s M&A co-chair Graeme Sloan took on the equivalent role at MoFo in the summer of 2015, tasked with rebuilding its UK M&A team. Eight other Latham hands would follow, including fellow corporate partner Vladimir Maly later in 2015, as well as Gary Brown and Andrew Boyd, who made partner through the move in March 2016.
Sloan says the aim was to bring its City operation into line with the quality tech deals MoFo was handling firm-wide: ‘Historically, people identified MoFo as a firm with a large tech focus, but the tech work in London was not comparable to what the firm was doing on the West Coast.’
As the office strengthened its links to the firm’s operations in the States and Japan in particular, Tokyo-based client Softbank provided rich pickings. High-value mandates the City team worked on included its $6bn investment in UK group WeWork last year. Tech clients already account for about half of MoFo’s transactional work.
Four years since the Cooley departures, the firm counts 25 lawyers in its M&A team, with Dan Coppel hired from Jones Day as the fifth partner in February 2018. Overall City headcount has risen 62% over the last four years to reach 73, while revenue grew steadily to hit £30.9m in 2018, up 25% on the previous year.
As it now looks to strengthen its links to sponsor clients, it launched a private equity real estate practice at the beginning of the year after hiring Oliver s’Jacob and Luke Mines from Reed Smith.
Kandel, meanwhile, plans to double the size of his nine-lawyer team to build a credible deal finance practice, albeit one more targeted at lender clients than the sponsors his old firm coveted.
Nevertheless, the path to improving MoFo’s City reputation will be long. The firm has been outpaced by many West Coast rivals in recent years. In 2018 MoFo’s global revenue dropped 2% to $1.04bn and profit per equity partner was $1.98m.
And in London the firm has struggled to replicate the calibre of its US practice or carve out clear market positioning. Its current highest UK ranking in The Legal 500’s UK edition is at tier three, which it attains for fraud; white-collar crime; IT and telecoms; and debt capital markets.
While US peers have bounced back from reverses in the UK, it will take several years of expansive form in the City and stateside for perceptions on MoFo to much improve.
marco.cillario@legalease.co.uk
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