Ropes & Gray has officially launched an office in Paris with a team the firm recruited late last year from Clifford Chance. 

The team is led by partners Fabrice Cohen, Thierry Arachtingi and Emmanuel Mimin and focuses on private equity, infrastructure, banking and finance transactions. Ropes & Gray did not specify how many lawyers had joined them for the move, but said they were accompanied by a “large” group of counsel and associates. 

The new office is the Boston-based firm’s first in continental Europe. Ropes & Gray chair Julie Jones described the launch as a milestone for the firm as it “expands into this dynamic European market for private capital and strategic M&A”.

“France is an important region for our global clients, who are active across Europe, investing and seeking to expand their operations there,” she added. 

The new office is the firm’s third in Europe after the 30-partner London base it opened in 2010 and the small Dublin office it launched two years ago, which focuses on competition and life sciences work. Ropes & Gray said the three offices would operate as a single European hub, working with its other bases across Asia and the US to support clients in raising and deploying equity and debt capital across Europe. 

Cohen has been named managing partner of the Paris office. He advises private equity firms, sovereign wealth and pension funds, and publicly listed companies on public and private M&A, as well as on corporate reorganisation. 

He led the Clifford Chance team that guided PAI Partners on the $3bn sale of French board game publisher Asmodee in 2021 and has also acted for Pernod Ricard, the world’s second-largest wine and spirits seller, on several deals. He was a partner at Freshfields and Willkie Farr & Gallagher before joining Clifford Chance in 2014. 

Meantime, Arachtingi spent more than 20 years at Clifford Chance, before which he was a partner at White & Case. He specialises in banking and finance, with an emphasis on acquisition finance, real estate finance and debt restructuring. 

Mimin is also an M&A lawyer and focuses on private capital transactions, advising private equity firms, multi-asset managers and sovereign wealth and pension funds across investment structures and strategies, including secondaries and co-investments. He joined Clifford Chance in 2015 from Mayer Brown, where he was a partner. 

Cohen described Ropes as a “global leader in private capital and strategic M&A”, adding the Paris team aimed to build on the firm’s reputation across some of the most active sectors in the space such as healthcare and life sciences, technology and infrastructure. 

Ropes & Gray jumped eight places to 16th in the London Stock Exchange Group’s global M&A legal advisor rankings last year, after working on more than 200 deals worth $136.8bn. 

The firm, which had revenue of nearly $3bn in 2023, marks a fairly rare entrant to the Paris market, though last summer Texan firm Bracewell opened in the city with an 11-lawyer energy team from Norton Rose Fulbright. 

Last December US firm Morgan Lewis also significantly expanded its presence there when it absorbed the 50-lawyer Paris office of Kramer Levin not included in the latter’s planned merger with Herbert Smith Freehills. 

Clifford Chance confirmed the departures of Cohen, Arachtingi and Mimin last December, around the same time it announced the hire of private credit partners Arnaud Fromion and Frédéric Guilloux in Paris from Goodwin Procter.