Top ten global firm Kirkland & Ellis continues to build its Asia offering hiring Hogan Lovells head of restructuring in Asia, partner Neil McDonald, in Hong Kong.
McDonald, who heads Hogan Lovells’ business restructuring and insolvency practice in Asia, is understood to have resigned recently. The firm’s regional managing partner for Asia and the Middle East, Patrick Sherrington, is now tasked with considering McDonald’s successor and is understood to be looking to make the appointment internally.
A leading individual according to the Legal 500, McDonald is described as knowing ‘the market exceptionally well, and really makes himself available to clients’.
He advises on all aspects of financial distress such as consensual workouts, shareholder disputes, liquidations, receivership’s, and is ‘equally skilled at handling both contentious and non-contentious matters’.
Hogan Lovells has a highly respected tier one restructuring practice in Hong Kong, and houses the ‘best all-round practice in town’. Clients include Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, FTI Consulting (Hong Kong) and KPMG, and the team previously advised an ad-hoc committee of bondholders on Sino-Forest Corporation’s default of its obligations under $1.8bn of notes.
Kirkland & Ellis expanded its sizeable Chinese footprint in September last year by opening an office in Beijing, with corporate partners David Zhang, who joined from Latham & Watkins in 2011, and Chuan Li, the founding partner of the firm’s Hong Kong and Shanghai offices, to spearhead the launch.
sarah.downey@legalease.co.uk
