Weil’s London co-managing partner, David Avery-Gee, is set to join Sullivan & Cromwell (S&C) alongside corporate partner Sarah Flaherty, as senior exits from Weil continue to mount on both sides of the Atlantic.
At S&C, Avery-Gee will serve as co-head of European M&A alongside Olivier de Vilmorin in Paris, the firm said on Thursday.
News of their move comes less than a week after it emerged that Weil's corporate department chair Michael Aiello was defecting to Cravath Swaine & Moore in New York alongside a team of five M&A partners, around the same time Weil's private equity co-head, Chris Machera, moved to Paul Weiss in the city.
A clutch of Weil partners has also defected to Simpson Thacher & Bartlett this year, among them London energy and infrastructure M&A specialist Murray Cox, with S&C also repeatedly hitting the firm to build its City bench in a drive that began last September with the hire of its former London managing partner Mike Francies.
S&C said Avery-Gee and Flaherty would "add significant strength to our global M&A practice and enhance the advice we provide to our clients on their most important transactions.”
Avery-Gee's practice covers cross-border public and private M&A, joint ventures, public takeovers, distressed M&A and the corporate aspects of restructurings. He currently serves as Weil's London co-managing partner alongside Jonathan Wood and head of its London M&A practice.
Earlier this year he advised Advent and FedEx on their €7.8bn takeover of InPost Group. Recently he and Flaherty – both of whom were partners at Linklaters before joining Weil – also acted for Glencore on its planned $260bn merger talks with Rio Tinto.
Flaherty's work covers international public and private M&A, corporate restructurings, joint ventures and equity offerings. She previously had two year-stint on secondment as a senior case officer at the UK Takeover Panel and is noted as
one of London’s leading Takeover Code lawyers.
S&C's London co-managing partners, Kon Asimacopoulos and John Horsfield-Bradbury, said the duo's capabilities "complement our US securities and regulatory expertise and our continental European M&A practices in Paris, Frankfurt and Brussels.
"Their arrivals also mark another important step in the continued growth of the London office,” they added.
Including Avery-Gee and Flaherty S&C has recruited 13 lateral partners in London over the past year, among them Weil finance trio Chris McLaughlin, Alastair McVeigh and Jenny Choi. Its City office now boasts 30 partners amid a wider team of more than 120 according to its website – its second-largest globally and around 40 more than New York rival Davis Polk.
For its part Weil, which also saw a three-partner restructuring team led by Neil Devaney leave for Akin in London in May, has been adding senior talent in the City in recent months, recruiting leveraged finance partner James Crooks from Sidley Austin and secondaries partner Charles Cooper-Isow from Kirkland & Ellis.
Bloomberg Law reported the firm had selected Michael Lubowitz, a New York-based public company M&A dealmaker, and Kyle Krpata, a Silicon Valley private equity lawyer, to lead its 600-lawyer corporate practice after Aiello's departure.
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