Willkie Farr & Gallagher has opened an office in Hamburg with recent hires from Latham & Watkins and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. 

The office – the firm’s third in Germany and 16th globally – will open with around 25 lawyers and initially offer services in restructuring, litigation and private equity. 

It will include partners Jörn Kowalewski and Ulrich Klockenbrink, co-chairs of the firm’s German restructuring group, who joined last year at the helm of an 11-lawyer restructuring team from Latham. 

It will also house partners Rüdiger Lahme and Andreas Ruster, market-leading cartel litigation lawyers who joined the firm earlier this year from Quinn Emanuel, and members of their team, alongside lawyers who focus on corporate transactions.

“As a firm, we have been growing strategically across practices and geographies for the last several years, including in Germany,” said Willkie chairman Thomas Cerabino. 

“Opening in Hamburg, home to major corporates including existing Willkie clients, further expands our practice offerings in the region and enables us to better serve clients worldwide.”

The launch continues Willkie’s steady growth in Germany, where it has nearly tripled its lawyer headcount over the past five years to 90 and last year added an office in Munich to its existing footprint in Frankfurt. 

The firm noted it has been building its transactional practice and expanding its legal advisory services in the market by introducing a number of new practices, including capital markets, real estate, litigation, restructuring, employment, financial regulation and compliance.

Willkie joins a small group of AmLaw 100 law firms with offices in Hamburg, led in terms of office size by Hogan Lovells, which has 110 lawyers based in the city, according to publicly available data tracked by Pirical. Other firms with a presence there include DLA Piper, White & Case, Latham & Watkins, Norton Rose Fulbright, Littler Mendelson, Quinn Emanuel and BCLP.