Simmons & Simmons has added a quartet of real estate partners from Goodwin’s Frankfurt office ahead of its closure later this year.
The team includes transactions specialists Marc Bohne and Moritz Vettermann, tax and structuring partner Felix Krüger and finance partner Jochen Schnepper, who will join Simmons’ Frankfurt office as partners alongside a team of associates.
The hires are the latest step in a European real estate push by Simmons that saw it add partner Michaël Lévy to the practice in Paris from Hogan Lovells last month alongside Laure Nguyen, who made partner on the move.
Early last year Morrison Foerster’s London private equity real estate head, Oliver s’Jacob, also defected to Simmons alongside Danielle Hirsch, who joined as a partner having been a counsel at MoFo.
The firm also boosted its London construction bench over the course of last year with the hire of Clifford Chance’s head of construction Marianne Toghill, and Greenberg Traurig shareholder Trevor Cosgrove.
Ali Crosthwaite, Simmons’ head of UK real estate and co-head of the firm’s cross-border real estate group, commented: “As we see other firms retrenching from real estate in certain markets, we see an unrivalled opportunity to attract high calibre partners to our excellent cross-border real estate network as we seek to provide a ‘one-stop shop’ to our institutional and PERE clients for complex, cross-border mandates.”
Simmons said the incoming group meant its international real estate practice would house around 75 lawyers and marked a significant expansion of its Frankfurt office, taking it to 17 partners.
The group is well known in the market for high-profile corporate and private equity based real estate transactions, between them advising clients including 777 Capital, Tikehau Capital and Castlelake.
Simmons’ Germany country head, Thomas Scharfenberg, said the team’s hire was a “strategically very important development for Germany and our Frankfurt office in particular, broadening the strong foundation of expertise that we offer as a firm, both domestically and internationally”.
He added: “Our offering in Germany, which includes first class transactional and project development real estate expertise in our Frankfurt and Munich offices, is integral to the firm and these hires reflect the top quality and long-term growth ambitions that Simmons has for the market.”
Bohne had been chair of Goodwin’s Frankfurt office, having joined the firm in 2016 as part of a team hire from Ashurst to launch the office.
Goodwin said in June that it had made the decision to “wind down” its German real estate team and as a result would close the office this autumn, leaving it with the Munich office it opened in 2022 to focus on private equity work as its sole location in the country.
The closure comes amid a period of churn for international law firms in the German market, with Dechert and Cleary also exiting Frankfurt and Pinsent Masons cutting its German headcount as other firms expand in the country.
Since the start of last year, Kirkland & Ellis opened in Frankfurt; DLA Piper opened a fifth German office, this time in Dusseldorf; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher and Greenberg Traurig both set up shop in Munich.
Email your news and story ideas to: [email protected]
