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  • April 22, 2010 |

    Milbank recruits Shearman Lat-Am chief to head up new Sao Paulo outpost

    Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy has become the latest US firm to set up shop in Brazil, hoping to secure a foothold in the country's booming economy, reports The Am Law Daily. The New York firm's new Sao Paulo office will be led by Andrew Janszky, the former head of Shearman & Sterling's local operations.

    1 minute read

  • April 21, 2010 |

    Media and internet: The content business

    Once, life was simple in the media business. Media companies produced content - though they didn't call it that - for the masses. Film studios, record companies, publishers and broadcasting groups either owned or had significant control over distribution channels for that content. Life was also much simpler for media lawyers. Work was filled with low-level litigation, turning out fairly standard copyright agreements and, if you worked for one of the acquisitive media conglomerates, bringing in external counsel for intermittent bouts of empire building

    1 minute read

  • April 14, 2010 |

    US Briefing: Road trip

    At around 3pm on 6 October 2009, roughly 100 lawyers and executives filed into a conference room in Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom's Manhattan office. It had taken three years, 11 months and 29 days to get to this moment: Delphi was emerging from the depths of bankruptcy and passing into the hands of its former parent, General Motors Company (GM), as well as two lenders. There was a palpable sense of exhaustion in the room; the close had been convened seven hours earlier. The Veuve Clicquot, selected by Delphi lead lawyer John 'Jack' Butler Jr but poured prematurely, was flat.

    1 minute read

  • April 14, 2010 |

    Leading Indian firm tops Asia M&A league as deals recover

    India's AZB & Partners has topped the volume rankings for Asia-Pacific M&A for the first quarter of 2010, knocking Australian leader Freehills down to second place against the same period last year. Mergermarket's Asia-Pacific rankings for Q1 show the Clifford Chance (CC) alliance firm advised on 15 deals over the period, ranking it ahead of Freehills, which advised on 14.

    1 minute read

  • March 31, 2010 |

    Grosvenor hires former Freshfields lawyer as first-ever GC for Britain & Ireland arm

    Property development company Grosvenor Britain & Ireland has recruited Ulrike Schwarz-Runer from Dubai Holdings as its first general counsel. Schwarz-Runer joined Grosvenor on 29 March, leaving her role as GC at the Dubai Government-owned holding company. She will be based at Grosvenor's London headquarters. Prior to Dubai Holdings, Schwarz-Runer was formerly a corporate lawyer at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and US firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and also an executive director at Goldman Sachs in New York, London and Frankfurt.

    1 minute read

  • March 16, 2010 |

    Simpson Thacher and Wachtell lead on Apax's $3bn Tommy Hilfiger sale

    Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz have taken lead roles on buyout house Apax Partners' sale of Tommy Hilfiger to US clothing giant Phillips-Van Heusen for $3bn (£1.9bn). The sale comes around four years after Apax purchased Tommy Hilfiger for $1.6bn (£1.1bn) and took the company private.

    1 minute read

  • March 10, 2010 |

    US briefing: Still paved with gold

    Nothing captured the spirit of the leveraged age for Wall Street law firms quite so much as the private equity 'club' deal. As the name suggests, the deals attracted quite the crowd: lawyers for the consortium of buyers, the underwriters who scrambled over themselves to fund the buyouts and the target company. To celebrate a closing, the lawyers even threw what passes in the corporate legal world as a party: speeches, champagne and the exchange of Lucite trophies.

    1 minute read

  • March 3, 2010 | International Edition

    US firms paused expansion in 2009 but are back on the hunt

    As Legal Week's survey of lateral hiring by US firms in London recently demonstrated, partner moves were thin on the ground in 2009, at least by the yardstick of recent years. The research found 59 hires across 37 of the largest US firms. This was substantially down on the senior recruitment seen at US firms over the last five years - this group managed 77 partner hires in 2008 - but in many ways it is surprising that the figure wasn't even lower. Lateral hiring virtually shut down in the first half of 2009 as firms drastically slashed costs in the worst phase of the global recession. The second half of the year, which saw an aggressive hiring spree from Greenberg Traurig Maher claim no less than 15 partners, was pretty active in contrast.

    1 minute read

  • March 3, 2010 |

    US firms paused expansion in 2009 but are back on the hunt

    As Legal Week's survey of lateral hiring by US firms in London recently demonstrated, partner moves were thin on the ground in 2009, at least by the yardstick of recent years. The research found 59 hires across 37 of the largest US firms. This was substantially down on the senior recruitment seen at US firms over the last five years - this group managed 77 partner hires in 2008 - but in many ways it is surprising that the figure wasn't even lower. Lateral hiring virtually shut down in the first half of 2009 as firms drastically slashed costs in the worst phase of the global recession. The second half of the year, which saw an aggressive hiring spree from Greenberg Traurig Maher claim no less than 15 partners, was pretty active in contrast.

    1 minute read

  • February 18, 2010 |

    BLP and Kirkland advise as Reader's Digest goes into administration

    Kirkland & Ellis and Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) have taken key roles on the administration of Reader's Digest and the Chapter 11 of its US parent company. Readers Digest Association filed for Chapter 11 in August last year after struggling with payments on its $2.2bn (£1.4bn) debt, and the UK arm of the subscription-only magazine filed for administration yesterday (17 February) after plans to reduce its £125m pension deficit failed, putting 117 jobs at risk.

    1 minute read