Cleary has turned to Linklaters M&A partner Nick Rumsby to boost its corporate offering in the City, in what will be seen as an impressive coup for the Wall Street firm’s usually cautious London strategy.
A Linklaters lifer, Rumsby has an enviable track record of advising on market-leading public M&A deals in recent years. Particular highlights include Greene King’s £2.7bn sale to Hong Kong real estate group CKA and G4S’s hostile £3.7bn offer from Garda World Security and the recommended £3.8bn offer from Allied Universal.
In addition to his 16 years as a partner, Rumsby also brings invaluable experience acting for the regulator, having served as a secretary at The Takeover Panel for two years, a position held by only five partners in the last decade.
Cleary M&A partner Tihir Sarkar told Legal Business: ‘Nick held a very senior position on The Takeover Panel for a couple of years and has had a great diet of public takeover work since he went back to Linklaters twelve years ago to make the most of that panel experience. We are really pleased to land him because, if you look at his deal CV, it’s literally a ‘who’s who’ of deals. He has also been leading one of Linklaters’ four corporate groups, a group of 12 partners and 40 people, for the last six years.
‘We’ve been looking for about two years for the right candidate. We want to ensure a good cultural fit. We are known for high-end M&A, and there is only a narrow band of people we can slot into that franchise that have the right kind of stellar reputation. We really think we have landed on the best candidate with Nick. He’s a really good person as well. We’ve got to know him quite well as our recruiting process is very thorough.’
Rumsby’s arrival will be seen as a major fillip for Cleary as it continues to develop its public M&A offering in the City. On the subject, Sarkar added: ‘We’ve been involved in a lot of public deals of late. We were involved in Allied Universal’s bid for G4S. We were also deeply involved in the Signature Aviation deal and the very recent Open Text bid for Micro Focus. It’s always been a focus for us, and Nick really bolsters our standing in that community. That’s important for the private equity strategy as well.
‘If you look at the bidders of UK targets over the last few years, a lot of them have been private equity. The current economic situation means there are businesses on the FTSE which are primed for takeover as their valuation has gone down, although the underlying businesses are quite good global businesses not overly exposed to the headwinds specific to the UK.’
The move is another blow to Linklaters’ M&A practice, which lost global US practice head and former senior partner candidate Tom Shropshire to an in-house role at Diageo in 2021 , and David Avery-Gee to Weil in 2020.