Biglaw Firm Gets Busy Shedding Finance Partners

Big shake-ups at the Magic Circle firm.

goodbye farewell lateral partner moveThe Magic Circle firm of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer has placed a premium on profitability, which sounds great, unless you are a finance partner at the firm. After an internal review, the firm has decided that group just isn’t cutting it, and is focusing its efforts on a narrower range of products.

Last month, we brought you news of departures from the firm’s aviation finance group — along with some anonymous comments from current and former Freshfields partners who indicated more shake-ups were on the way. Now we know that six partners will be out the door by the end of the month, and two have been downgraded to non-equity partners. As Law.com reports:

Six finance partners will leave Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer at the end of this month, while two others will be deequitised from the partnership, as the firm completes a restructuring of its global finance practice.

Five of the partners leaving the firm are based in London, while one is based in New York.

In London, they include City aviation finance partner Rob Murphy who is to join CDB Aviation Lease Finance – the aircraft leasing unit of China Development Bank – as general counsel and chief operating officer.

Meanwhile, one New York and one London partner will lose equity partner status in April but remain with the firm.

All of this is after a swath of London-based partners were already bumped down to the lower tier of partnership last year:

Legal Week reported last year that Freshfields had moved a number of partners in London to its second tier lockstep, with a small number in the finance practice understood to have been affected.

One wonders what other changes the Freshfields partnership will have to endure before the ship is righted.

Six Partners to Leave Freshfields This Month as Part of Finance Restructuring [Law.com]

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headshotKathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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