Deal Week has found of late that you just cannot rely on anything to stay the same. Take Sullivan & Cromwell, which for years has been verbalising its European strategy with all the aggression of a Dale Winton tea party. Yet even the most closeted of City deal-doers cannot have failed to have noticed a more bullish stance from the Manhattan firm of late.
This has been most obvious in Paris, where Sullivan’s nine-partner branch has run up a string of premium deals before rounding the year off with the hire of Dominique Bompoint. And the signs are that this new enthusiasm for local law has reached London, in part ironically thanks to the success of US partners like George Sampas in ‘quarter-backing’ European deals.
