The lateral hires market has seen significant moves recently with Dechert hiring more partners from Sidley Austin, Crowell & Moring making another hire from Squire Patton Boggs and Hill Dickinson expanding the firm’s commodities team with two partners.
Dechert added to its global finance and litigation practices with the recruitment of Aparna Sehgal and Simon Fawell from Sidley, following structured finance partner John McGrath, who recently joined from the same firm. Furthermore, Dorothy Cory-Wright was appointed last year as head of disputes and is also from Sidley.
Sehgal is the fourth finance partner Dechert has hired in the last nine months and works with clients from financial institutions, alternative capital providers and corporates on issues concerning multi-jurisdictional transactions, intercreditor issues, acquisition and financing of performing and non-performing loan portfolios, insolvency and enforcement strategies.
Co-leader of the global finance practice group Richard Jones commented: ‘Aparna is a strong addition to our global finance team. Her extensive experience in real estate finance complements our existing capability and strengthens our offering to our financial services clients.’
Gus Black, global co-chair of Dechert’s financial services group, added: ‘Her appointment, which closely follows the additions of John McGrath and Simon Fawell, supports Dechert’s strategic growth plans in London to meet growing client demand.’
Crowell & Moring once again hired from Squire Patton Boggs, recruiting litigation partner Laurence Winston to co-head the firm’s international disputes resolution group. His appointment comes amid a turbulent period for Squires’ London arm, which has been depleted by a number of departures since the beginning of the year, most of which have decamped to Crowell & Moring.
Financial litigation partner and former City head Robert Weekes left for Crowell & Morning in January, and was later joined by insolvency partners Cathryn Williams and Paul Muscutt. Energy partner Robin Baillie and finance partner Andrew Knight also left Squires for Crowell & Moring in February.
Elsewhere, Hill Dickinson announced the hire of Mark Aspinall and Paul Sinnott from Eversheds Sutherland into the commodities team. This follows the recent hire of litigation partner Beth Bradley, previously of Clyde & Co, and takes the number of partners in the group to nine.
Aspinal has expertise in dispute resolution, transactional matters covering trade finance as well as physical trading of steel and non-ferrous metals, shipping fraud, asset tracing and seizure actions. Sinnott, a commodities lawyer in both the physical and derivatives markets working mainly for energy and metals industry clients, focuses on transactional and regulatory matters as well as disputes resolution.
Hill Dickinson head of commodities Jeff Isaacs told Legal Business: ‘We’ve seen a marked uptick in commodities work, particularly on the soft agricultural commodities front where we have a particular specialism. We have plenty to do and we have a strong influx of work and we’re confident about the future.’
Stewarts hired David Savage to its financial crime department from SG Kleinwort Hambros Bank, where he was group senior sanctions officer. Savage follows Richard Kovalevsky QC, who established the firm’s financial crime department in July 2018, and brings experience working in the financial crime within a bank.
Savage told Legal Business: ‘Financial crime compliance is becoming more and more costly. Regulators have cottoned on to the fact that this is a big ticket business that they can extract large sums of money, by way of fines, from various companies. It’s going to be, in the near-term, a huge cost for anyone involved in international business to combat financial crime.’
Finally, DLA Piper also announced a hire in the form of Marine Lallemand, who will join the litigation and regulatory practice in Paris from Orrick Rambaud Martel.