Links, CC take on gangs of New York

Adding five partners to an office in the space of two working days is a tidy piece of business by anybody’s standards. On Monday Linklaters announced the hire of King & Spalding investment management partner Stephen Cullhane (see story). The hire came hard on the heels of the recruitment of a four-partner litigation team from White & Case, the subject of last Friday’s blog.

If Linklaters and its UK magic circle rivals are going to build their own New York offices from the ground upwards, they are going to have to become canny recruiters. There is certainly evidence of some nifty footwork surrounding Linklaters’ hire of the White & Case team, which also included 12 associates. The bulk of this group formed its own discrete unit, having only joined the New York firm four years ago, following the merger of their firm, Squadron Ellenoff Plesent & Sheinfeld with Hogan & Hartson. Lawrence Byrne and Joseph Armao and a team of six assistants, two of who subsequently became partners, ended up at White & Case because of conflict problems. Their subsequent move to Linklaters suggests they did not settle in their new home.

You can normally get an idea of how well a firm with expansionary ambitions is doing by looking at the kind of firms they are hiring from. Of the four international magic circle firms, Linklaters and Clifford Chance (CC) have been by far the most active recruiters in New York over the last couple of years. A round up of their hiring activity (below) shows that White & Case has been the biggest victim of this activity, losing six partners in total. While White & Case is a New York firm, its international ambitions make it a prime target, not just because its partners are likely to have wider international horizons, but because running large international networks is expensive, providing an almost inevitable drag on profitability compared with New York’s top tier.

As for the other targets, the table highlights a clear pattern. At partner level, Linklaters and CC have been hiring from mid-tier New York firms and the New York offices of out-of-town US firms. But they have not left New York’s top tier unscathed. While building a credible New York office from scratch presents huge challenges - not least that of gelling together a disparate group of lawyers - the fact that Linklaters’ office is in growth mode gives it the opportunity to dangle the prize of partnership to talented associates in leading local firms whose path to that coveted partner position cannot be guaranteed.

And while CC’s operation can hardly be said to be a start-up, it too is firmly in growth mode after suffering a sustained period of partner losses. The pair’s combined hiring spree has yielded partner-level hires from Cravath Swaine & Moore, Sullivan & Cromwell, Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, among others.

Only time will tell whether they have got the right people, but you cannot accuse them of not trying.

Linklaters
Cadwaladar Wickersham & Taft – associate to partner
Cravath Swaine & Moore – associate to partner
Jones Day – partner
King & Spalding – partner
Latham & Watkins – partner
O’Melveny & Myers – partner
Shearman & Sterling – associate to partner
Sullivan & Cromwell – associate to partner
White & Case – four partners

Clifford Chance
Cahill Gordon & Reindel – one partner and one associate to partner
Chadbourne & Parke – two partners
King & Spalding – partner
Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy – associate to partner
Paul Hastings Janofsky & Walker – of counsel to partner
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett – senior counsel to partner
White & Case – two partners
Winston & Strawn – partner

john.malpas@legalweek.com