Two standout moves in June and July saw the Magic Circle and the Wall Street elite each lose and gain one in partner reversions in London.
Ward McKimm, one of thestra most upwardly mobile partners the City has seen, made good on a long-rumoured defection to Shearman & Sterling’s capital markets practice, having previously worked there for some 14 years, becoming partner in 2005 and co-head of its corporate group in 2010.
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, after breaking its lockstep to attract McKimm from Kirkland & Ellis in 2015, may have had a feeling of déjà vu, the dust having barely settled on David Higgins’ high-profile exit to Kirkland despite the Magic Circle firm overhauling its partnership model to keep star players.
McKimm had kept regular contact with his former shop and had been in discussions about returning for some time, a process that was expedited by the departure earlier this year of high-yield guru Apostolos Gkoutzinis for Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy.
Matthew Readings, Shearman’s London office managing partner, said: ‘Ward’s market profile has gone from strength to strength. He has retained strong relationships with the banks and has been successful at building sponsor and private equity-side relationships too. Hiring him makes sense in all sorts of ways.’
Citing the firm’s market-leading practice and its integrated capital markets and finance business as draws for McKimm, Readings stressed that the hire is not merely an attempt to plug the gap left by Gkoutzinis’ departure but is part of a strategy to keep investing in the business, with both organic growth and opportunistic lateral hires on the cards.
Shearman has five other City capital markets partners – head of European capital markets David Dixter, Marwa Elborai, Trevor Ingram, Jacques McChesney and Pawel Szaja.
For Freshfields’ part, McKimm’s exit leaves a team of three high-yield partners in London – Simone Bono, Denise Ryan, as well as Andy Hagan, who followed McKimm from Kirkland to Freshfields in February 2016.
More of a surprise was Bob Penn’s decision to return to Allen & Overy (A&O), a firm he left in April 2016 after 17 years to join Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. It was a rare high-profile exit for the Magic Circle firm and a rarer-still acquisition for Wall Street-bred Cleary.
While the elusive prize of the transatlantic sell remains up for grabs by US and UK players alike, Penn’s return is testament to A&O’s deep financial services regulatory bench, which now seats six partners.
A&O hired Herbert Smith Freehills partner Nick Bradbury in 2016 and fintech specialist Ben Regnard-Weinrabe from the London arm of Paul Hastings earlier this year. The team, led by Damian Carolan, also includes partners Etay Katz and Kate Sumpter.
Carolan said that it was not only pleasing to reverse the trend of partners leaving the City elite for US firms in London, but also because top senior names in the financial services regulatory space are few and far between. He described Penn’s hire as a high-end value play geared at winning the most strategic work for the most strategic clients.
At a time when demand for financial regulation advice is at an all-time high, A&O’s plan to build out its partner ranks, both from within and with the right laterals, seems like a sensible one.