Following the collapse of King & Wood Mallesons‘ (KWM) European arm last week and the lateral moves of all but 33 of its partners, Greenberg Traurig has confirmed CBRE, Westfield and British Airways’ Pension Fund have followed a six-strong group of former KWM partners to Greenberg as new clients.
Others in the list that Greenberg will now advise include Brockton, Cain Hoy, Europa Capital, M3 Capital, Paloma Capital, Revcap and Rockspring.
The group joined Greenberg in late December and includes real estate funds partners Steven Cowins and Marc Snell, real estate partner Matthew Priday, corporate finance partners Michael Goldberg and David Fitzgerald, and tax partner Clive Jones and their respective teams.
The Crown Estate, another one of Cowins’ (pictured) key clients, announced earlier this month that following a review process last year it has given Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) the sole mandate for its £7bn Central London property portfolio. The Crown Estate has not been named as a new client by Greenberg.
Greenberg executive chairman Richard Rosenbaum said: ‘We are pleased to see that our strategy of delivering excellence and value in both real estate and funds across the firm attracted these top tier lawyers to our London office.’
‘We are of course excited that world class, sophisticated companies of this nature would choose to follow, and are committed to serving them as the very important clients they are,’ he added.
The list represents mostly clients that were brought on by Cowins, whilst some clients went to Greenberg through other team members.
According to Ashfords partner Sam Palmer, who as solicitor manager to legacy SJ Berwin’s administrators Quantuma has been dealing with the orderly transfer of client files since the practice went into administration, only around 5% of clients decide not to follow partners to their new firms and decide to take their work in progress elsewhere.
While Greenberg is adding to its books, Quantuma released their first interim report to creditors earlier this week. This concluded that partner exits accelerated the demise of legacy SJ Berwin practice, and begins an investigation into the firm’s previous financial practices.
georgiana.tudor@legalease.co.uk