IP exits add to Mayer Brown lev fin walkouts
Mayer Brown’s London office has been hit by two more partner exits in London after the firm announced the closure of its London trademarks practice.
Ian Coles
IP partners Ian Wood and Mary Bagnall, who have left to join Charles Russell, are the fifth partners to leave the firm’s City office since December. In a statement, the firm says: “Trademarks and design filing work does not fit in with the direction of our IP practice for the future,” adding: “We continue to work in all other areas of IP.”
The firm has also hit back at accusations that its leveraged finance team is in turmoil following the departures of Lee Cullinane and Jacqueline Evans last month.
“There’s a serious chance the department could implode,” posted one user on TheLawyer.com. “Someone needs to take hold of the reins, but it’s unclear how the department’s fortunes will be reversed in the short term.”
Others have questioned the wisdom of Mayer Brown setting up a leveraged finance team at the lowest point of the economic downturn.
“It was an easy time to pick up acquisition finance partners, but they obviously didn’t integrate with the rest of the finance team,” one former Mayer Brown partner tells The Lawyer.
Cullinane and Evans joined the firm in 2009, from Clifford Chance and Allen & Overy (A&O) respectively, to spearhead the firm’s push into leveraged finance in London. They were joined by partners Nicola Marley from Linklaters, Graham Wedlake from Taylor Wessing, John Clark from Clifford Chance and Neil Caddy from A&O.
While Evans and Cullinane were unavailable for comment, sources cite several possible reasons behind their departures, including their frustration at Mayer Brown’s lack of a high-yield capability in London and Cullinane being overlooked for the role of London finance head, which went to Dominic Griffiths last summer.
Mayer Brown head of finance in Europe Ian Coles, who sits on the firm’s partnership board, insists that the firm does not regret its aggressive push into the leveraged finance space and dismisses claims that the departures of Evans and Cullinane are a catastrophic setback for the firm.
Explaining the firm’s original decision to move into leveraged finance, he says: “Growing the London finance group as a whole has always been an important goal of the firm, and to
have a sustainable finance practice in London to complement the US.
“In the past we’d always ranked highly for areas such as structured finance and derivatives, but we didn’t have that bit in the middle – a leveraged finance practice that defines relationships with financial institutions.
“We always thought of it as a two- or three-year project, so it did come as a surprise when they told us they wanted to leave.”
Coles says the firm does not regret the spate of hires it made in 2009.
“You need to look back at what we’ve done in the past couple of years,” he says. “We’re now up to 52 lawyers in the finance practice, which is one of the largest outside the magic circle in London.
Coles points to the fact that last year the finance team won places on both the Lloyds TSB and Nomura panels for the first time as evidence of its strength.
The firm will also continue to recruit in finance and is looking to bring in a high-yield capability.
What will concern the firm is the fact that Evans and Cullinane are not the only lawyers to have left the firm recently. Earlier this month it saw three defections from its Hong Kong office, with partner Nick Longley and associate Richard Lyons leaving for Holman Fenwick & Willan and consultant Kingsley Ong jumping ship to Eversheds.
In London the loss of construction partner Nick Henchie is seen as a potentially bigger setback than those of Cullinane and Evans.
As one ex-partner says: “Nick was one of the brightest partners the firm has produced for a long time.”
Readers' comments (10)
Anonymous | 11-Jan-2011 10:29 pm
Since the departure of Paul Maher early in 2009, the firm has lost some of its most impressive partners. What does the future hold for Mayer's city office given that it's clearly struggling to retain talent?
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Anonymous | 12-Jan-2011 11:31 am
Actually, the talent starting leaving a long time before Mayer left. MB has loft several hundred partners globally over the last 5-6 years, many of whom left as a result of Maher's management regime. Maher's management legacy is the state of the firm and the departures you're now seeing. Notably few if any of the "talent" followed Maher to his shingle.
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Anonymous | 12-Jan-2011 7:40 pm
Interesting comment given that the very man we're talking about was voted into the office of chairmen with over 80% of the partnership vote, a figure that was higher than any other partner in a management role at the time. What are going to claim next the vote was rigged? To set the record straight the election was carried out by an independent firm of accountants!
Point of information: Paul Maher was a global vice- chairman at Mayer Brown for a mere 18 months, a period which didn't see several hundred partners leave the firm. Prior to this, Paul Maher was Senior Partner of the firms London office for 5 years, during this time less than 20 partners left the office, prior to 2007 Maher was only one of many partially involved in the firm's 'management regime'.
The truth is he left the firm because he disagreed with it's strategy going forward, he could have easily stayed, in fact, he was offered money by the now Chairman to do so. The current management regime has adopted a completely different strategy to the one he wanted to implement hence the significant partner exodus over the last 18 months. I'll throw in another fact for you Mayer Brown have lost more partners over the last 18 months than they have in any other 18 month period over the last 20 years ,this is a direct comment on Maher's exodus and the current management regime and it's flawed strategy.
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Anonymous | 13-Jan-2011 10:05 am
@anonymous 11.31am - would you care to give some examples? A lot of garbage has been blogged about MB since Maher's departure, but I have to say your post takes the biscuit. I am not prone to posting blogs on this site (or any other for that matter) but as one of the partners who has left MB in the last 18 months I can assure you that the reason for leaving was entirely to do with lack of faith and trust in the current management regime who lack vision, strategy, management ability, interpersonal skills, a credible client following - the list is endless. To suggest otherwise is to show precisely the ill founded, head-in-the-sand arrogance that has led MB to the position in which it now finds itself.
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Anonymous | 13-Jan-2011 3:07 pm
Maher was not voted by 80% of partners as chairman of Mayer Brown as one previous post claims. Partners don't vote for Chairman. The P&P committee elects the chairman and it elected someone else instead of Paul, which lead him to throw his toys out of the pram and leave. You can therefore discount anything that Anon@7.40pm says as he/she clearly doesn't know anything.
I agree with anon@10.05, there is a lack of vision, faith, trust, interpersonal skills, etc, but in this respect nothing has changed since Maher's time in charge. To suggest the current departures are somehow supportive of him is ridiculous. MB lost as many partners during his time in charge as they are losing now. It's just a continuation of the revolving door.
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Anonymous | 13-Jan-2011 4:47 pm
I would just add two comments. Firstly, the "go forward" partners who went into the merger with Mayer Brown, led by Maher, were a very cohesive unit. That continued well into the early years of the merger under Maher and it was only when the US decided to exert greater influence after the events of 2007 that this changed. Perhaps a case of "divide and conquer" by the powers that be in Chicago (and some in London too) who felt threatened by Maher's influence.
Secondly, the current crop of departures are made up of two types of partner - expensive laterals who came in on guaranteed packages and who either failed to deliver or for whom MB could not provide an adequate platform, and longer serving home-grown partners who have grown disillusioned with the emphasis that has been placed on and money that has been thrown at these shiny new toys to their detriment. It is in this respect that the current management regime have got things horribly wrong and I think you will find that there are far more partners in that category who have left or who are leaving than there were in Maher's time in charge.
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Anonymous | 14-Jan-2011 10:58 am
I think if you did a trawl through the comment pages on this august website for the period 02-07, you would see as many comments about Maher (including flame outs for and against) as you still see now. If Maher was so highly regarded, you have to wonder why out of the "very cohesive unit" only 4 partners (none of whom would be considered "rainmakers") left to join him at GTM. Either Maher didn't have the wide spread support that is claimed, or he didn't think much of his fellow partners, or the unit wasn't so cohesive and they simply went their own way.
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Anonymous | 14-Jan-2011 1:48 pm
I'd still quite like to know who all these people were that left as a result of Maher's management regime, which is where this discussion started.
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Anonymous | 14-Jan-2011 4:13 pm
I recall 120+ partners leaving over 06-07 during the "Troika" period of management. Does that count?
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Anonymous | 16-Jan-2011 4:35 pm
You missed some - Olga Loy (Chicago) and Michael Butowsky (Washington) both to Jones Day, Elana Hahn to Mofo, FSRE team to BLP.
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