It’s your twentieth birthday and you’re flush with cash. How do you mark the occasion? If you’re the London office of Kirkland & Ellis, you recruit the City’s pre-eminent banking partner.
When it hires, the Chicago-born firm tends to go big. The signing of Weil Gotshal & Manges’ London banking head Stephen Lucas – a lawyer described by one new colleague as “a genius with boundless energy” – comes in the wake of several marquee appointments in the last year. First came former SEC enforcement director Robert Khuzami. He was followed by two of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett’s biggest hitters: M&A rainmaker Sean Rodgers in New York and Andrew Calder in Houston.
