Linklaters’ partner Tom O’Neill has swapped Silk Street for Old Broad Street with King & Spalding making a double hire to anchor its capital markets practice in Europe.
A member of the New York Bar, O’Neill leaves Linklaters after 13 years as a partner. He specialises in corporate finance and securities offerings, representing issuers, sellers and underwriters in offerings of equity and debt securities.
He spent seven years in Linklaters Paris office before heading up the firm’s Turkey desk from London. He’s been involved in the £1.9bn privatisation of Royal Mail and the transactions for holiday retailer Thomas Cook Group and insurer Direct Line.
King & Spalding, which hired Bingham McCutchen’s London restructuring partner Elisabath Baltay last month, has also recruited Latham & Watkins New York-qualified counsel in capital markets Markus Bauman. The firm has brought him in as a partner in what marks a period of aggressive expansion for the firm. Bauman, who spent four years as executive director of Goldman Sachs’ investment banking legal department, joins after a recent spell in the debt capital markets legal department at JP Morgan.
‘Tom and Markus are strong additions to our corporate practice and bring us a new dimension,’ said Ray Baltz, head of corporate at King & Spalding. ‘Tom’s broad capital markets experience is a natural complement to the complex M&A, private equity and finance work we provide our clients, while Markus’s capital markets experience and his perspective as both in-house and outside counsel lend insight and depth to the firm’s growing European capital markets work.’
O’Neill added: ‘King & Spalding has a dynamic London office. We could not pass up the opportunity to work with the entire corporate team in London, New York and around the world to continue to build out the firm’s capital markets practice.’