With the world and his wife’s lawyer trying to get into European private equity, recent pronouncements by White & Case that it aims to carve out a bigger slice of the market look to many like wishful thinking.
It is a tough sector to crack, notably in the mature City market, and although US firms like Kirkland & Ellis and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett have made progress following major US clients into Europe, it is not as if White & Case’s name Stateside is synonymous with private equity. With US considerations secondary in this case, the word from the firm is that the gap-inthe-market syndrome is at play, with the City finance team convinced that the firm can take more business with a stronger equity offering.
