DLA Piper’s recent takeover of French corporate boutique Frieh Bouhenic is the most significant development in a spate of activity involving UK-based international firms in Paris at the end of the summer.
The international giant officially joined forces with the corporate firm on 1 October. Eleven-partner Frieh Bouhenic is ranked in the second tier for private equity in The Legal 500 EMEA, with a particular reputation for leveraged buyout work. Recent highlights include advising the consortium comprising Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, AXA Private Equity and Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec on the acquisition of SPIE.
Name partner Michel Frieh is particularly well known as a corporate specialist and was one of the founding partners of Willkie Farr & Gallagher’s Paris office. There is a Linklaters connection with DLA Piper global co-chairman and senior partner Tony Angel: Frieh was a partner in Linklaters’ Paris office until 2007 when he left to form his own boutique.
The other name partner, Pierre-Alain Bouhénic, is a restructuring and litigation specialist who worked at Weil, Gotshal & Manges in Paris before setting up his own boutique practice in 2009.
Bijan Eghbal, who will lead DLA’s Paris office alongside Frieh, said that the arrival of the Frieh Bouhenic team has helped to beef up its corporate offering in the French capital as well as adding a new dimension to the practice.
‘I think because of the size of the firm and the nature of our clients we needed to have a larger corporate group,’ he said. ‘With the additional expertise that this move clearly brings in, this is very positive for us.’
‘With the additional expertise that this move brings in, this is very positive for us.’
Bijan Eghbal, DLA Piper
The move to one of the world’s largest international law firms seems a strange u-turn for the founders of Frieh Bouhenic, who both left large international firms in 2007 and 2009 respectively to form their own boutiques which joined forces in 2011.
‘I think what has attracted Michel and his team is that DLA Piper is quite different from the other large firms in the sense that it is extremely entrepreneurial,’ said Eghbal. ‘I suppose for Michel it was an opportunity to benefit from an international platform which is probably more important to his clients nowadays than before. At the same time, he didn’t want to be burdened by the way more traditional firms would function. Here he finds an entrepreneurial practice that he might not have found at another firm.’
Eghbal added that while the corporate advisory market had opened up a little in recent years, established players still prevailed. However, there are more opportunities for firms with the right levels of expertise.
‘Clients are viewing the way that services are rendered to them and the value that they get for the cost,’ he says. ‘It’s more important to them now probably than it was before, even on those major transactions, so I think that if you have the capacity and the quality, people will start to look at that.’
DLA’s move caps a busy summer in the Paris law firm market. Taylor Wessing completed the hire of Orrick Rambaud Martel partner Alfred Fink in September to lead its French real estate team. Meanwhile, Pinsent Masons launched its second European office in Paris on 1 September. The office will be staffed by a nine-partner team from Marccus Partners, the legal arm of Mazars, and follows the firm’s launch in Munich on 1 July.