Starting in early 2006, White & Case’s London office went on a hiring binge. Within 18 months the firm more than doubled the number of London-based lawyers working on private equity financings, topping 100. Now, thanks to a slowdown in big-ticket private equity deals, White & Case says it will farm out about a dozen London-based partners and associates to other offices, from Moscow to Johannesburg, within the next six months.
“For the last two or three years, everybody has been saying, ‘Please send us more En-glish lawyers,’” says London partner Maurice Allen. “We said, ‘Look, we just can’t spare people.’ Now we can.”
