Eversheds Sutherland’s Irish arm has seen four corporate partners and their teams exit in Dublin for top Irish independent William Fry in the wake of the breakdown of merger talks between the two firms.
Partners Gerard Ryan, Gavin O’Flaherty, Enda Newton and Maria O’Brien have joined William Fry with members of their teams, according to sources with knowledge of the matter. GLP understands between 10 and 15 lawyers will move over in total.
News of the hires follows the two firms confirming in late May that their “exploratory” merger talks had ended and that each firm would “instead focus on their individual strategic growth priorities”.
Eversheds said at the time that it planned to launch fully integrated operations in Ireland in September under its international LLP, staffed by around 20 partners, less than half the number its website listed for its offices in Dublin and Belfast.
The firm currently operates in Ireland as Eversheds Sutherland Ireland, an Irish partnership that is a member of Eversheds Sutherland Europe.
It isn’t immediately clear what will happen to Eversheds Sutherland Ireland, which is led by managing partner Alan Connell.
Legacy firm Eversheds entered the Irish market back in 2005 through an alliance with legacy O’Donnell Sweeney, which rebranded as Eversheds in 2011.
The arrival of the quartet of partners and their teams at William Fry means it has one of Ireland’s largest corporate and M&A practices, with 15 partners and around 25 more lawyers.
The firm, which has roughly 320 legal and tax professionals in total, has acted in two of the three biggest deals in Ireland in the first half of the year.
It advised the Department of Finance on the completion of a €1.2bn share buyback with AIB and listed Irish business services group DCC on the €1.2bn sale of its healthcare division to HealthCo Investment, a subsidiary of funds managed by Investindustrial Advisors.
William Fry and Eversheds Sutherland declined to comment.
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