Nowhere has the battle for City legal talent been more intense than in leveraged finance. Will the Americanisation of Europe’s credit markets drive on the advance of US firms or has the bubble burst?
‘It’s a shrinking universe in terms of those playing in the top tier,’ says one partner. ‘Two years ago there were about 15 firms which were completely capable and honest when they said: “We’re a leveraged finance house.” I don’t think that’s the case anymore. It’s a very, very small community and there are so many more clients concentrated with fewer firms.’
There are interesting times ahead for the City’s leveraged finance sector, that discrete ecosystem that has seen more upheaval since the banking crisis than any comparable practice line as the Americanisation of Europe’s credit markets took hold.
Only its sister discipline – private equity – has seen more aggressive hiring by elite US law firms, which have pushed to dominate the lucrative deal finance sector rather than focus on the commoditised investment debt managed by City rivals. The hierarchy of the market, once utterly dominated by senior lenders, has been turned on its head as more heavily regulated banks have retrenched and capital-rich funds have asserted their authority.
As Kirkland & Ellis leveraged finance playmaker Neel Sachdev notes: ‘We’ve seen a shift in financings over time towards private equity clients taking control of processes, drafting documents, and driving innovation in structures and terms. The sponsors are driving the leveraged finance market.’
With $8m-a-year deals for elite partners, leveraged finance has been the advance line for potent operators like Kirkland, Latham & Watkins, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, fundamentally challenging the Magic Circle’s dominance in its heartlands.
Perhaps the most striking recent move was Latham’s recruitment last year of Allen & Overy (A&O) heavyweight Stephen Kensell, one of the brand names in arguably the City’s strongest finance shop. The hire made explicit how directly some US firms are looking to challenge City rivals.
Yet the market potentially faces an inflection point very different to the shifts of the boom years of 2013 and 2014 when junk bonds finally stormed Europe after more than a decade of false dawns. Currently, deal volumes and sizes are subdued. High-yield bonds have been squeezed in favour of more flexible loans and the spectre of Brexit promises to hang ominously over the market for years.
After years of intense competition in leveraged finance, the question remains, who will be the winners and losers now that the convergence between terms across loans and bonds and New York and English law deals has largely run its course? The consensus is that the market will be increasingly dominated by a smaller band of firms, and the risk for some players is that their expensively assembled ranks will be left under-employed.
One leading leveraged finance partner at a US-based firm argues the market has reached a point of equilibrium: ‘There has been quite a dramatic shift over the last couple of years, I don’t see a huge amount more. People seem to have set up stalls at the top of this market and I’m not sure if there will be huge momentum shifts to come for those guys who are trying to catch up. It’s not gonna happen naturally – something dramatic will have to happen for that to shift.’
‘Every top global firm is in a race for top-quality talent with deep and strategic client relationships. There aren’t many readily moveable lateral leveraged finance partners.’
Scott Zemser, Allen & Overy
Researching this piece, one of the City’s select group of brand name high-yield partners privately floated the possibility that he would have to widen his focus in the face of subdued European demand for junk bonds.
But the stakes are high and the game is one that few are prepared to quit. As Scott Zemser, who last year led a well-regarded US leveraged buyout (LBO) team from White & Case, along with lawyers from Proskauer Rose and Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, to A&O, notes: ‘Every top global firm is in a race for top-quality talent with deep and strategic client relationships. There aren’t that many readily moveable lateral leveraged finance partners. Some of these lateral acquisition opportunities involving a top-tier partner or groups rarely come around, and some only come every ten or so years. The top tier of the leveraged finance partner legal market isn’t as large as everyone thinks.’
The direction the market ultimately takes promises to be one of the decisive factors in defining the hierarchy of London’s legal market for years to come.
‘They’re the best’
Assessing the new hierarchy for Europe’s leverage finance market, it would be an understatement to say that the Los Angeles-bred giant Latham is the new standard-bearer. ‘Latham is the best,’ concedes one finance head at an elite London firm, summing up common sentiments. ‘I am not sure they have many challenges.’
Bar occasional gripes about ‘supermarkets’ and ‘volume businesses’ – high-yield bonds, for instance, not being the most complex of documents – Latham is without doubt viewed as the strongest team operating in the City after more than a decade of sustained investment.
The firm – a pioneer in the US deal finance market during the buccaneering 1980s – currently has an unparalleled line-up of partners in its City stable, among them names like Sam Hamilton, Jay Sadanandan, Dominic Newcomb, Chris Kandel and Dan Maze, while younger partner Mo Nurmohamed is singled out by peers (‘he’s been phenomenally successful’ notes one rival). Nurmohamed has been a regular for JPMorgan Chase & Co, Sadanandan acts often for CVC Capital Partners and Onex Partners (not to mention ‘running Latham’s City office in her spare time’), and Newcomb is a primary for key client The Carlyle Group. Another notable younger partner is Ross Anderson, who is a regular for Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse.
The firm also, of course, has Richard Trobman – the elder statesman of Europe’s high-yield community. One Magic Circle peer comments: ‘Rich is on top of the whole of the European market – he knows every deal and every banker. A true strategic thinker. If you talk to Latham partners, they love operating under his umbrella.’
The seeds of Latham’s current dominance can be traced back to 2010, when the firm shipped in a four-partner team from White & Case in London, under Kandel, which also ushered in Hamilton and Sadanandan.
Playing off its calling card of advising underwriters on bond work, Latham has invested heavily to widen its practice substantively into senior debt providers and sponsors across a range of product lines. Latham understandably now makes great play of its four bases of coverage: US and European loans and bonds.
‘That obviously comes with some challenges for them but they do a great job in managing them,’ says one partner at a competing US law firm. ‘They are really high quality, they’re dominant in underwriter high-yield bonds. They’ve become a US Magic Circle-lite.’
The firm’s London-based finance practice took on a number of partners outside its deal finance core last year, including Slaughter and May structured finance partner Sanjev Warna-kula-suriya, real estate finance specialist Quentin Gwyer – formerly GE Capital Real Estate’s executive counsel for European debt – Dechert’s Jeremy Trinder, and Rob Moulton and Nicola Higgs from Ashurst. The firm had also already made heavy investments in its private equity practice to support core clients like Carlyle, including hiring Clifford Chance (CC) partners David Walker and Kem Ihenacho in 2013 and 2014.
‘The sponsors are driving the leveraged finance market.’
Neel Sachdev (left) and Stephen Lucas (right), Kirkland & Ellis
The team boasts an impressive list of recent deals, including advising Kuwait’s EQUATE Petrochemical Company on $5bn conventional and murabaha term loans and revolving credit facilities to refinance EQUATE’s existing debt, and ConvaTec in connection with its $2bn refinancing. The firm also last year worked on the €7bn refinancing of Pirelli after handling its LBO in 2015, one of Europe’s largest deals.
Despite the robust market profile, 2016 is conceded to have been a subdued year for Latham, given the lull in bond financing. But Kandel argues the firm now has the range to move with the tides of the credit market. ‘Change will continue and the market will be up for grabs for a number of years. But what that change will be is hard to predict. We think that not worrying so much about what type of debt products are needed is a strength. Whatever the market throws at us we are well positioned for it. And if we go into a restructuring market, well, we do that in all of those places too.’
Even against this backdrop of heavy investment, the hiring of Kensell, one of the leading banking lawyers at A&O, was particularly striking, reflecting the desire to boost its presence with senior lenders and the investment grade sector. Kensell is bullish that Latham will continue on its upward trajectory: ‘It’s hard to see [Latham’s success] reversing. We’re a permanent fixture in London, we have a multitude of very highly-ranked practices and we’re growing others.’
The other US outfit with momentum and breadth to its practice is White & Case, which benefits from a rock-solid bank pedigree, a large global network and sustained investment in its private equity team since the 2013 recruitment of Linklaters duo Ian Bagshaw and Richard Youle. The duo has been a huge success for the firm’s previously underweight City corporate practice – and comes amid a wider shift at White & Case away from emerging markets and towards transactional work in key hubs.
Interestingly, given that Bagshaw and Youle had been at loggerheads with Linklaters’ management over the lack of dedicated banking coverage, and the pair are known for being highly demanding of debt colleagues, their performance is admiringly cited by many LBO partners at rival firms.
Though White & Case is seen as relatively underweight on high yield because of a historic lack of bond focus in New York and its positioning as a bank rather than sponsor team, the firm has confounded the critics who wrote it off as a serious force in deal finance after the 2010 Latham departures.
The White & Case practices now hold 11 leveraged finance partners and four high-yield partners based in London. Banking sector head for EMEA Lee Cullinane says the firm advises sponsors, borrowers, traditional investment banks as well as new credit providers with key clients, including Deutsche Bank, GSO Capital Partners, Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Nordea.
High-yield partner Rob Mathews comments on the firm’s approach: ‘The way we differentiate from our competitors is that we try to cover all those areas. Our strategy makes us unique in that we have a broader perspective. Other firms would define theirs as a debt capital market practice, a finance practice or a high-yield practice. We define ours broadly, we go after everything that’s out there and we believe we’re a leader in all those areas.’
Younger partners tipped include Gareth Eagles and Jeremy Duffy. If the general view is that White & Case has some way to go before filling out its coverage in bond and sponsors, after a strong run of growth both in London and globally the firm is better placed than many expected a few years back.
‘They wake up in the night’
While a few US advisers have attempted to build broad debt practices comparable to City rivals, there is no doubt as to the bellwether firms for sponsor finance, with Kirkland and Simpson Thacher standing apart from peers. The firms have widely contrasting histories and cultures but have both been hugely influential in the City leveraged deal market in popularising the idea of teams heavily geared towards sponsors, a significant shift for a sector once dominated by banking lawyers.
Kirkland, in particular, makes great play of its sponsor focus as being free of conflicts and allowing more robust representation of clients. It has paid off. Although Kirkland’s hard-driving, individualistic style continues to draw admiration and brickbats in equal measures, no-one denies that the Chicago-bred giant has become a major force in the London leveraged finance sector. Even more than Latham, Kirkland is the firm most associated with creating a star transfer market for deal finance lawyers with multimillion-pound remuneration packages.
Similarly, the firm’s tendency to churn through large ranks of salaried partners with only a few high billers getting the rich rewards of full equity – top earners can get more than $8m a year – means Kirkland is still the firm that tends to horrify the traditionalist banking counsel pining for the days of the lender-dominated ‘London rules’.
‘It’s hard to see Latham’s success reversing. We’re a permanent fixture in London, we have a multitude of very highly-ranked practices and we’re growing others.’
Stephen Kensell,
Latham & Watkins
Sachdev tells Legal Business: ‘There are now a lot of different providers of debt capital. It’s not limited to banks nowadays. Sponsors can access the term loan or bond markets, and even direct lending and credit fund markets for flexible, patient, covenant-lite financing solutions.’
The firm has recently advised key client Bain Capital on the financing aspects of its $3.1bn sale of London food supplier Brakes to North American marketer and distributor of food service products, Sysco; Lone Star in the financing aspects of its €2.2bn acquisition of German manufacturer the Xella Group; and Advent International, Bain and Clessidra on the offering by Mercury Bondco of €1.1bn of PIK notes to finance the acquisition of Italian payments group Istituto Centrale delle Banche Popolari Italiane.
In the last year Kirkland has brought in Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer real estate finance partner Jonathan Birks, who joined former colleague and leveraged finance partner Michael Steele, a new addition to the firm in 2015. Birks’ hire complements recent joiner corporate real estate partner Matthew Elliott from Linklaters, who is already established as one of Kirkland’s top billers.
Such moves came after the headline-grabbing recruitment in 2014 of Stephen Lucas from Weil, Gotshal & Manges, one of the most visible names in London’s deal finance scene. The recruitment of Lucas was in part a drive to widen Kirkland’s deal practice, which was felt to be too narrow. The intense Lucas is something of a Marmite figure in the buyout community but has many admirers and is conceded to have brought more structure to Kirkland’s efforts after the individualist free-for-all of earlier years.
Set against that, even by the firm’s standards, Kirkland has seen a lot of churn over the last two years. The firm lost its bond heavyweight Ward McKimm to Freshfields in 2015, with the City giant offering a package well above its lockstep. McKimm was later joined by fellow high-yield partner Andrew Hagan last year, leaving Kirkland, according to some, heavily reliant on rising star Matthew Merkle.
The shake-up in its status quo contributed to finance veteran Stephen Gillespie in 2015 joining Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. More damagingly, its LBO practice suffered a rare team loss in February 2016 when a six-partner corporate team led by Erik Dahl quit for Sidley Austin. In February, Sidley returned to Kirkland to hire a seven-partner private equity team in Munich. Kirkland, however, this year bolstered its buyout practice with a series of notable hires, including Linklaters partners Stuart Boyd and David Holdsworth.
But while Kirkland is claimed by some rivals to have been pushed down into the mid-market on the corporate side, it retains huge professional respect from peers as a debt counsel and remains the benchmark for a hard-edged sponsor-facing team. The flamboyant Sachdev, who had championed the expensive recruitment of Lucas, is also one of the most admired leveraged finance lawyers in the market.
One peer at a rival US firm cites the firm’s relentless focus on its clients’ commercial goals: ‘The guys at Kirkland are really up there in my mind in terms of what they want to achieve for their clients. I think they wake up in the middle of the night and say: “We want to be the best on the sponsor side,” and that’s what they’ve achieved.’
‘There are a lot of different providers of debt capital. It’s not limited to banks. Sponsors can access the term loan or bond markets, and even direct lending and credit fund markets.’
Neel Sachdev, Kirkland & Ellis
Simpson Thacher has followed the same sponsor-led focus on the back of its private equity strength in Wall Street, thanks to marquee clients like KKR, The Blackstone Group and Apax Partners. It remains a very focused and lean operation in London – and is more focused on handling high-end work for core clients than hugely widening its client roster. But its model remains highly effective, with the firm now generating well over £100m in London after dramatic growth over recent years.
The practice includes two of the most cited names in the City LBO scene: bond specialist Nick Shaw and Ian Barratt, who has handled a string of major deals for KKR. The conservative lockstep Wall Street firm could not be more different from Kirkland. The common thread is the hard-driving work ethic.
Shaw says: ‘Simpson is a bit different to some other American firms so people get very surprised about our culture and collegiality. It’s actually funny because the Magic Circle has gone a lot further than us in terms of management layers and hierarchy. We practise law as a pretty old-fashioned partnership so people think it is awesome when they arrive.’ The firm also has the well-regarded debt finance partner Sinead O’Shea and bolstered its bond practice with a rare lateral hire in 2014 of Gil Strauss from Weil, who returned to Simpson Thacher after leaving for Freshfields in 2010 to make partner.
A later entrant to London, the Boston-bred Ropes & Gray has pursued a similar slant on private and sponsors since 2010, with the firm handling a string of major LBO and bond financings in recent years. Ropes & Gray, known for advising Liberty Global and Altice, advised Vodafone Ziggo, a joint venture between Liberty Global and Vodafone in its recent euro and dollar term loan refinancings. The euro term loan was upsized from €500m at launch on 17 January 2017 to €2.25bn while the dollar term loan was increased, from $1.05bn to $2.525bn. The firm also advised Virgin Media on its £865m term loan and high-yield bond financings, issuing £675m of senior secured notes due 2027.
Discussing Liberty and Altice, the firm’s global finance co-head Jane Rogers says: ‘Those are two hugely important anchor clients for us that keep us quite busy but the most important thing to note is that the percentage of the broader work in the office that they represent is shrinking, not because their work is shrinking, but because the other work is growing.’
‘Our strategy makes us unique – we have a broader perspective.’
Rob Mathews, White & Case
The firm is, however, currently looking to broaden its practice into bank clients, recently handling work for Goldman Sachs and Nordea. London head Mike Goetz says: ‘The bank side is developing nicely. We, from time to time, are asked to represent the banks by some of our clients or by some people who are working opposite us but mostly our major focus is the issuer side.’ The firm will be hit by Maurice Allen’s move to DLA Piper this year, losing its hugely influential co-founder who had helped bring in significant business. As successful as the firm has been, it now has a transition phase to get through.
With a fresh wave of firms like Goodwin Procter and Proskauer Rose currently investing in leverage finance – making a play of the European implosion of King & Wood Mallesons – the queue of US advisers targeting the City market with a strong focus on sponsors will surely lengthen. For City players – incapable of replicating equivalent ties with primarily US-based funds and investors or with the coverage in New York law products – this remains an ominous sign.
‘A long way to go’
Of the major outfits with more balanced practices, Shearman & Sterling, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy and Weil, Gotshal & Manges all remain well regarded players tilting towards the banks. Weil Gotshal – despite an underweight bond profile – retains a formidable roster of clients, including Advent, CVC, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley. Key partners include London banking head Mark Donald and leveraged finance partner Tom Richards.
One London peer comments: ‘When Stephen Lucas left for Kirkland you might have thought it was the death knell for Weil’s practice but it’s grown from strength-to-strength in the last 18 months to a year.’
While Shearman is regarded as lightweight in private equity circles, the reviews on the debt side are far warmer for its bank bond practice, with key partners such as Apostolos Gkoutzinis, Ronan Wicks and Jacques McChesney.
L-R: Lee Cullinane and Rob Mathews, White & Case
Of the trio, the most bank-centric is Milbank. The team’s European leveraged finance head Suhrud Mehta and leveraged finance partner Neil Caddy are both cited in the market, especially the well-regarded Mehta.
Against the widening array of US firms targeting the City leveraged finance market is an array of London’s traditional leaders: A&O, CC and Linklaters, who all focused historically on major banking clients.
The market consensus is that A&O retains a strong position and the firm’s drive to bolster its US practice has been well received. Following the four-partner hire in New York last year led by Zemser, the firm this February followed up with a three-partner New York hire from Paul Hastings, taking the US firm’s high-yield co-head Bill Schwitter, high-yield specialist Michael Chernick and securities partner Jeffrey Pellegrino. Both moves saw A&O offer above-lockstep terms to secure strategic hires.
But while the hires are widely viewed as the kind of high-impact commitment the firm needs to make ground in a shifting deal finance market, considerable cynicism remains over how much ground the Magic Circle firm has made in bonds.
‘A&O has a long way to go to be credible in high yield,’ says one sceptic. ‘Every year for the past five years, they say they are number one in high yield in Europe and investors send these tables to me with sarcastic notes asking how they come up with it. City firms have not figured out the US products. They’re all struggling.’
That reading is more downbeat than most peers, with the consensus view that A&O has made the most progress in US deal finance of its City peers.
White & Case benefits from a rock-solid bank pedigree, a large global network and sustained investment in its private equity team since the 2013 recruitment of Bagshaw and Youle.
Linklaters – despite having probably the weakest US practice of London’s big four – still gets much credit for the space it carved out through the 2000s under seasoned performers like Gideon Moore, Nick Syson and Adam Freeman. Nevertheless, the firm’s leveraged finance team is seen as going through a transitional phase after a period of subdued growth in finance and the departure this year for Sidley Austin of much tipped restructuring and deal finance specialist Yen Sum, who was spearheading the firm’s efforts in the increasingly important alternative lender space, was unwelcome.
Perhaps surprisingly CC names, aside from Charles Cochrane, are less cited among hardened leveraged finance hands amid now familiar claims that it has yet to establish its young ranks as veterans move into management or retire. Whether perception, reality or a result of the firm’s focus on traditional lenders, one of the City’s benchmark names in deal finance now receives less attention in the gossipy LBO sphere.
‘The market will be up for grabs for years. Whatever the market throws at us we are positioned for.’
Chris Kandel, Latham & Watkins
A singular case is Freshfields, which has been increasingly explicit in attempts to reposition its finance practice more closely around its private equity partners. Aside from marquee hires like McKimm and polished performers like the much-admired Sean Pierce, the firm in February secured a headline-grabbing private equity team from Ashurst in France. The five-partner group included Laurent Mabilat, one of Paris’s top leveraged finance lawyers, and corporate star Nicolas Barberis, and was one of the largest team moves ever between top ten London law firms, demonstrating the premium being placed on the area. Freshfields’ reshaping of its finance practice has likewise positioned the debt team to more explicitly support its ambition to dominate Europe’s leveraged finance market. If there is such a thing as a sponsor-facing City player, Freshfields is it.
Converging
The furious jostling in Europe’s leveraged finance scene appears, if anything, to be intensifying, despite a quiet period for primary deals and an uncertain outlook. Market uncertainties in the era of Brexit and Trump and a subdued deal market have taken the heat out of the junk bond boom that gathered pace through 2012 to 2015.
More significant than short-term twists in the deal markets is the underlying shift in financing terms. If three years ago all the talk was of the march of bonds in Europe and comparable New York products, the rapid shift in leveraged loan terms towards looser covenants and more flexibility has tilted the balance back towards loans, a trend further underpinned by a humming CLO market.
High-yield partners struggled with a quiet year in 2016. European primary high-yield issuance totalled €81.3bn, down 14.7% from €95.4bn in 2015, according to the European high yield and leveraged loan report conducted by the Association for Financial Markets in Europe. Leveraged loans, however, saw the highest issuance volume since 2007. For the full year, €121.3bn in leveraged loans were issued, up 60% from 2015’s €75.7bn. European high yield has shown some short-term signs of recovery in 2017, according to Thomson Reuters stats, with 53 deals as at 22 March valued at $31.3bn.
One Kirkland partner notes: ‘Everything became covenant-lite, insurance covenants around the key points like additional debt incurrence or granting security, the symmetry between high-yield terms and loan terms became so close there was very little difference. The European market has shifted dramatically over the last four years so that leveraged finance terms look a lot more like they do in the US and look a lot more like high yield. There’s been a huge convergence in terms.’
‘Rich is on top of the whole of the European market.’
Richard Trobman,
Latham & Watkins
And while the push of US-based sponsors and the lure of American investors remains strong – frequently being tapped through the increasingly popular Term Loan B – English law has re-established itself and is seen to have reached an equilibrium. As yet, no-one is seeing a challenge to English law from Brexit.
Indeed, many US firms with a heavy sponsor focus now go out of their way to emphasise their English law capability. Says Kensell: ‘A few years ago everyone was talking about European deals done under New York law, now pretty much everything we do is here under English law.’
‘It’s a convergence of products,’ agrees one bond specialist. ‘The loan market is a lot more integrated. It used to be that bonds were more expensive but they provided better terms. Now the loan market provides equal flexibility.’
Laughs one US partner: ‘Some Magic Circle firms have struggled to work out how to focus on the product, they’ve panicked and taken a long time to get the high yield right, only to get it right at a time where actually having depth in the US market and in Europe on the loan side is every bit, if not more, important.’
And if the recent battles over US and English law products have settled in a tactical draw, there is no doubt that the American influence in Europe’s credit markets is here to stay, thanks to the ongoing march of sponsors, who, one way or another, are insisting on terms consistent with the US. Such sponsors are increasingly calling the shots and can generate huge amounts of work for their favoured legal teams.
As such, the biggest challenge may not turn out to be who has coverage in big-money niches like high yield, but which advisers can get in tune with the new generation of financiers. On this front, US firms have a cultural edge on UK rivals still hard-wired to service senior lenders.
Kirkland’s Lucas says US firms’ approach gives them a huge advantage. ‘The larger banking practices are set up to cover multiple products. The US firms are better aligned to map sponsors and credit funds clients for all of their capital solutions rather than individual products.’
What remains is a shifting market, with a low level of deals and investors chasing yield. For all the bravado typical of LBO partners, many concede privately they are nervous about the impact of Brexit. Without a rebound in deals, there will not be enough work to go around for all the high-earning teams.
The biggest challenge may not turn out to be who has coverage in big-money niches like high yield, but which advisers can get in tune with the new generation of financiers.
With more than a dozen US law firms throwing serious money at the leveraged finance sectors, many believe a reckoning will come at the expense of the also-rans.
Milbank’s Mehta concludes: ‘There is still a lot to play for. The market is a very interesting place, the deals have become complicated, there are great lawyers across all these firms but the one thing which is going to distinguish the winners from the losers going forward will be quality. Quality of the bench rather than size alone. There’s not enough work for the entire community of leveraged finance lawyers to do 10-12 hours of billable work per day.’ LB
madeleine.farman@legalease.co.uk
georgiana.tudor@legalease.co.uk
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Highly leveraged – the key teams at a glance
Jay Sadanandan, Latham & Watkins
LATHAM & WATKINS
Key clients: ConvaTec, EQUATE Petrochemical Company, CVC Capital Partners, PAI Partners, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank
Key partners: Chris Kandel, Stephen Kensell, Dominic Newcomb, Dan Maze, Sam Hamilton, Jay Sadanandan, Richard Trobman
London practice breakdown: 11 partners in banking and eight in high yield
KIRKLAND & ELLIS
Key clients: Advent International, Bain Capital, Lone Star, Partners Group, The Blackstone Group, Investindustrial, Sun Capital Partners, Lion Capital, Vitruvian Partners
Key partners: Stephen Lucas, Neel Sachdev, Michael Steele, Cedric Van den Borren, Bill Burke
London practice breakdown: Five partners in high yield, 15 partners in leveraged finance
SIMPSON THACHER & BARTLETT
Key clients: The Blackstone Group, KKR, Apax Partners, TDR Capital
Key partners: Nick Shaw, Ian Barratt, Sinead O’Shea, Gil Strauss
London practice breakdown: Three partners in high yield, five partners in banking
ROPES & GRAY
Key clients: Altice, Bain Capital, KKR Credit, Liberty Global, 3i
Key partners: Jane Rogers, Mike Goetz, Mark Wesseldine, Fergus Wheeler, Matthew Cox, Robert Haak
London practice breakdown: Nine leveraged finance/high yield partners in London
WEIL, GOTSHAL & MANGES
Key clients: Advent International, CVC Capital Partners, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Goldman PIA
Key partners: Mark Donald, Reena Gogna, Tom Richards, Patrick Bright
London practice breakdown: Six banking and two high-yield parters
SHEARMAN & STERLING
Key clients: JPMorgan Chase & Co, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, HSBC, Jefferies, BNP Paribas
Key partners: Apostolos Gkoutzinis, Ronan Wicks, Jacques McChesney, Korey Fevzi
London practice breakdown: Five partners in the finance group, four partners in capital markets
WHITE & CASE
Key clients: Anchorage, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Deutsche Bank, Nordea, Nomura Holdings, HgCapital, CVC Capital Partners, Goldman Sachs, Cabot, GSO Capital Partners, Barclays
Key partners: Lee Cullinane, Rob Mathews, Gareth Eagles
London practice breakdown: Eleven partners in leveraged finance, four in high yield
MILBANK, TWEED, HADLEY & McCLOY
Key clients: JPMorgan Chase & Co, HSBC, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Nomura, UniCredit, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Citibank
Key partners: Suhrud Mehta, Tim Peterson, Neil Caddy
London practice breakdown: 13 partners in banking and finance