Mr Girardet has reportedly been recruited to help the US-headquartered firm establish an anti-trust and competition practice in London. No stranger to the business of building new practices from the ground up, Mr Girardet was one of the nine partners tasked with launching legacy SJ Berwin’s own corporate investigations group in 2010. Prior to joining SJ Berwin in 2007, Mr Girardet served as deputy director of the cartels department in the Office of Fair Trading and as an associate at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.   

‘Another major step’

With experience advising on a broad range of UK and EU competition law matters, Mr Girardet has particular expertise in the areas of cartels, mergers, dominance cases and matters related to intellectual property. His departure will be felt at King & Wood Mallesons, where he is understood to have been one of the firm’s top 20 billers for the last financial year. Willkie Farr’s European anti-trust and competition head Jaques-Philippe Gunther described the latest hire as ‘another major step’ in the firm’s strategy to develop a gold-standard European practice for merger, investigation and litigation matters. Former Bain Capital Credit European general counsel Mark Fine and former Clyde & Co partner Andy Tromans are two other new faces to have been added to Willkie Farr’s London-based line-up in the last 12 months.

Sources: The Lawyer; Legal Business