Leading US firms continue to dominate the London recruitment market with significant appointments from the Magic Circle, as Weil, Gotshal & Manges hired Linklaters’ highly-rated M&A partner David Avery-Gee (pictured) shortly after Allen & Overy (A&O) saw corporate pair Simon Toms and George Knighton jump ship to Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.
The hire of Avery-Gee is a coup for Weil, which has struggled against more potent US rivals in recent years in London. The office has had setbacks in corporate, including the loss of London managing partner Mike Francies’ protégé Samantha McGonigle, who left after 13 years to co-found a growth fund in February.
With 20 years’ experience as a Linklaters lifer, Avery-Gee has a particular focus on advising on M&A deals and IPOs in sectors including natural resources, energy and financial services. He has advised Glencore on a series of transactions, including the merger with Xstrata and its listing on the London and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges.
A favourite of Linklaters senior partner Charlie Jacobs and acknowledged as a rising star in our 2016 M&A Report, he made partner in 2011 and had under his belt a valuable stint on the M&A team of the investment banking division of Morgan Stanley from 2005 to 2006.
News of the hire comes after recent LLP accounts showed that Weil’s London office increased revenue 15% from £126.1m to top £144.8m during 2018. Operating profit surged 23% to reach £70m as the partner profit pool increased 27% from £51.8m to hit £66m. The City office’s top-earning partner took home £1.72m on the back of the profit increase, a 41% increase on the previous year.
Meanwhile, in September A&O lost two of its most well-regarded London corporate partners to Skadden, shortly after its long-running merger talks with O’Melveny & Myers were called off. The departures to a US outfit carry a particular symbolic value at a time when A&O’s leadership has promised to fast-track investment in its US practice as the pressure to strengthen its capabilities Stateside persists. For Skadden, this is the biggest move for its European corporate practice since the hire of private equity partner Richard Youle from White & Case in 2017.
London M&A co-head Scott Hopkins said: ‘We’re constantly in the market executing large, complex, cross-border M&A deals. We’re not expanding without being careful in terms of how we do it. Our growth in London can be described as considered and stable. We’re constantly looking for incremental growth and assessing where we should be growing.
‘Simon and George add to the bench strength and central mass in our corporate group because they cover a broad range of transactions. But at the same time they were targeted – Simon has done a lot of tech and fintech work which synchronises nicely with our growth on the tech side of the corporate practice. They have great pedigrees, purely from a local perspective, which is also something that is important to us. It’s important that the quality of our English M&A practice is on par with the best the Magic Circle has to offer.’
For more on Allen & Overy’s corporate practice, see Deal View