Norton Rose releases four-partner Bakers team six months early

The four-partner securities team leaving Norton Rose for Baker & McKenzie will now quit the firm at the end of November, The Lawyer can reveal.

Originally Norton Rose was holding the team of partners Jonathan Walsh, Vincent Keaveny, Bruce Somer and Ian Porter to a 12-month notice period. However it has now agreed that the group can move earlier, as it announced a third hire that it hopes will fill the gap left by the partners’ departure.

Stephen Parish, head of banking at Norton Rose, told The Lawyer: “We’d always envisaged that it was likely that we would truncate the time we were holding the partners to. Now that we have got each of the bases covered it makes it easy for us to release the four.”

The third hire sees Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer senior associate Sandrine Sauvel join Norton Rose in January as a partner. She specialises in international debt capital markets.

Sauvel’s appointment follows the hires earlier this year of Laurence Garside from Lovells and Allen & Overy senior associate Tak Matsuda.