Taylor Wessing plunders Haarmann for M&A head

Taylor Wessing has raided German rival Haarmann Hemmelrath to boost its Munich corporate practice with two new partners, including the German firm's head of M&A Heinrich Rodewig.

Taylor Wessing's recruitment of Rodewig and corporate restructuring partner Thomas Krempl will be a further blow to Haarmann, which has suffered a series of high-level departures since name partner Wilhelm Haarmann announced in the summer he was leaving the firm. This was followed swiftly by news that Munich founding partner Andreas Oldenbourg was to leave along with fellow partner Simon Preisenberger.

Rodewig is a heavyweight corporate lawyer in the German market. Between 1991 and 1998 he was the general counsel for two of the Daimler businesses, Daimler-Benz Aerospace and Daimler-Benz, where he advised on the Daimler-Chrysler merger. Rodewig joined Haar-mann in 1999 as a partner. Deals he has worked on include advising industrial gas company Taiyo Nippon Sanso on its purchase of Air Liquide and acting for chemistry specialist Wacker-Chemie on its takeover by Geradyne.

Krempl has also joined Taylor Wessing's Munich corporate team. He joined Haarmann in 1989 and became a partner in 1995.

Taylor Wessing has been on an aggressive recruitment drive in Germany in 2005. It has recruited two technology partners this year, Detlef Klett from EY Luther Menold and Reinhard Gaertner from Bird & Bird.

But the movement has not all been one way, with Haarmann gaining two new partners for its Munich office. The firm landed real estate expert Frank Oprée from the local office of German firm Graf von Westphalen Bappert & Modest, where he had been just over a year, and Georg Nagler, a specialist in employment and administrative law from health insurance firm AOK Bayern, where he was on the executive board.