Linklaters lost a trio of heavyweight partners in February with Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy and Kirkland & Ellis cherry-picking from the Magic Circle firm.
Milbank built out its projects practice with the hire of two leading projects partners from Linklaters’ London office, Matthew Hagopian and Manzer Ijaz, who count among their clients Glencore, BP and Eni.
Hagopian, who is qualified in English and New York law, is co-head of Linklaters’ global energy sector and also leads the US law energy and project finance practice around the world. He has worked on more than 30 liquefied natural gas projects and counts Spanish oil major Repsol and Italian gas giant Eni among his biggest clients.
Ijaz, who has worked closely with Hagopian in building up Linklaters’ client base in the energy sector and is listed as a leading individual for oil and gas in The Legal 500, has advised BP in Angola, Russia and Azerbaijan, and counts the world’s biggest commodities company Glencore as a client.
Hagopian and Ijaz are two of Linklaters’ longest serving projects partners having both made partner at the Magic Circle firm in 1999. Legal Business understands that at the time of going to press Milbank and Linklaters were still thrashing out the terms of the move, with a joining date still to be confirmed. A spokesperson for Linklaters said: ‘We thank Matthew and Manzer for their contribution and wish them well.’
Meanwhile, Kirkland & Ellis hired Linklaters head of real estate M&A Matthew Elliott, who leaves the Magic Circle firm after 17 years, in a bid to boost its private equity offering within the real estate sector.
Elliott previously led Linklaters’ real estate private equity practice and specialises in advising financial sponsors on real estate investments. Some of his clients include Cerberus, Ares, PIMCO, TPG, Brookfield, Oaktree, sovereign wealth funds and Canadian funds including PSP Investments and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Recent work includes acting on the bid for Canary Wharf-owner Songbird Estates by Qatar Investment Authority and Brookfield Property Partners.
Elliott trained at Linklaters in 1998, and spent time in the firm’s Tokyo office in 1999 and 2000, after which he became an associate. He became a partner in 2010. The hire comes after the firm announced that former Kirkland partner and London head Jim Learner would return as a partner in the firm’s corporate practice.
tom.moore@legalease.co.uk