Weil Gotshal & Manges and Linklaters have both secured lucrative mandates on Lehman’s collapse as fears about the wider implications mount.
Weil Gotshal was appointed as the main legal adviser to the stricken lender, which filed for Chapter 11 on Sunday night (14 September) after numerous failed attempts to shed its ‘toxic assets’. Potential buyers including the Korean Development Bank, Bank of America and Barclays all walked away after weeks of discussions before the bank’s spectacular collapse.
The mandate will be seen as a coup for Weil Gotshal as the firm’s top-tier restructuring practice has lost a stream of high-profile names in recent years, both in the
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The collapse has also generated roles for Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Clifford Chance (CC) and Lovells among others.
Freshfields is acting for the Bank of England under restructuring partner Nick Segal and financial services chief Michael Raffan, who also led the firm’s team advising the Bank of England on its £50bn liquidity support programme earlier this year.
Lovells litigation partner Christopher Grierson and restructuring partners Laurence Crowley and Alexander Wood are acting
for the Financial Services Authority (FSA).
Separately, CC is continuing to advise longstanding client Barclays as it attempts to buy parts of Lehman’s
The instruction will hand CC potentially a high-profile mandate in the competitive US market as well as some consolation after Barclays walked away from its previous plan to take on the whole of Lehman.
Commenting on the mandates Lyndon Norley, head of Kirkland & Ellis’s European restructuring group, said: “It is not a BCCI or a Barings, but it could be a very intensive period for three or four months.
“It is an impressive mandate for the
One finance head at a top 10 City law firm added: “Landing the administrators’ role is definitely the plum job. That’s a big tick on their balance sheet as they get costs over and above everyone else”
A host of US firms, meanwhile, have won mandates advising on Bank of America’s (BoA’s) $50bn (£28bn) acquisition of Merrill Lynch. Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz has a 23-strong team, including 12 partners, advising BoA, while Shearman & Sterling is fielding a team for Merrill Lynch led by
With the impact of the banking crisis spreading across Wall Street, as Legal Week went to press Sullivan & Cromwell was acting for insurance giant AIG in its battle to stay afloat. Shares in the company fell by 60% on Monday due to fears it lacked the capital to make up for a threatened cut in its credit rating. Sullivan’s role for AIG is the second Wall Street-shaking matter for the firm in as many weeks as the firm also represented troubled US mortgage giant Fannie Mae on its Government bailout last week.
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