Mass hire from Pillsbury sees 15 partners defect.
Winston & Strawn, which had been looking to bolster its finance and corporate teams, pulled it off in a single move last month by hiring 15 Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman partners across five offices. The bulk of the hires were senior figures, including global finance chief Mats Carlston and London-based co-head of energy, infrastructure and projects, James Simpson.
Although he was in the third and final wave of lawyers to be announced as moving to Winston, Carlston was influential in pulling off the team move and has become co-chair of the firm’s finance practice. Formerly head of finance at Nixon Peabody, Carlston had formed a close friendship with his colleague Dom DeChiara, who now heads up Winston’s corporate team and helped to persuade Carlston and co to make the move.
Also taking up top positions at Winston are Washington DC-based corporate partner Chris Zochowski, who joins as co-chair of M&A and securities, and San Francisco-based head of investment funds Jay Gould, who takes up a similar position as co-chair of financial services and investment management.
The hires have been eagerly anticipated by Winston’s management for the past three months, with one partner saying they will help ‘build a stronger finance and corporate brand as we look to lean less on disputes’. Carlston said the aim was ‘to carry on being a litigation powerhouse, but [the firm] wants to balance growth between corporate and litigation’.
The team handed in their resignations in the middle of February, despite a crisis meeting at Pillsbury to try to stem the exits.
The biggest gains for Winston were in New York, where the firm took 11 partners, including Carlston, structured products chief Jeffrey Stern, asset-backed finance head William Egler, head of private equity James Kelly, and the office’s head of finance, Douglas Schneller. Leveraged finance lawyer Timothy Kober also made the move. The hires bring weight to Winston’s Wall Street offering. The practice was also boosted in 2012 with a large team hire from Dewey & LeBoeuf.
Carlston said that the success of that move played into his decision to go to Winston: ‘To be able to integrate such a large group from Dewey so well bode extremely well with me and set Winston apart from the other firms.’
The mass move also hit Pillsbury on the West Coast, with financial services partners Gould and Michael Wu both departing. Elsewhere, the hire of Pillsbury’s Abu Dhabi managing partner Stephen Jurgenson will see him launch Winston & Strawn in the Middle East, though more likely through a relocation to Dubai.
The arrival of both Simpson and Jurgenson, who worked together at Pillsbury to build a client base in the energy and infrastructure sectors, reinvigorates what has been a flagging international strategy at Winston following a number of partner exits in 2014. London partners are hopeful the hires will also boost a City office that has struggled to hit form in recent years.
tom.moore@legalease.co.uk