We love some inter-firm squabbling.
This time, it’s Ropes & Gray stepping on Kirkland & Ellis’s toes. The two firms had divided up the Bain Capital world (and work) pretty much along the lines of US work to Ropes, international to Kirkland.
But now Ropes is opening a London office with the hire of Maurice Allen and Mike Goetz, finance partners who recently left Freshfields.
The Lawyer reports that Bain may well be at the center of a turf war.
Details after the jump.
Allen and Goetz are bank-finance guys at heart, but they’ve also been joined at Ropes & Gray by their former White & Case colleague Jonathan Bloom, a high-yield guy, which gives Ropes the dual-threat of “bank & bond” one-stop shopping for finance counsel.
Kirkland was killing the European work out of its London and Munich offices, while Ropes wasn’t present in the Eurozone at all.
Ropes & Gray had the biggest recent deal for Bain: the Clear Channel going-private, which was co-sponsored by Tommy Lee. It’s not every day that private equity sponsors $27 billion deals, and if you’ve read The Deal Professor’s book, you’ll know that this deal happened thick in the middle of the PE meltdown. Not only did Bain and THL end up fighting with the DOJ, but they also had to sue their own lenders (and started copying a boutique firm on memos out of the blue months before filing).
Kirkland wasn’t entirely out in the cold, though. They got a few scraps in representing Radio One on buying $1.3 billion worth of forced asset sales from Clear Channel.
Other Bain deals Ropes has handled in the US include:
- (June 2007) $8.5 billion buyout of Home Depot Supply;
- (December 2007) $3 billion equity recapitalization of Quintiles, a pharma services provider;
- (January 2008) $1.3 billion going private acquisition of Bright Horizons Family Solutions, a provider of employer-sponsored child care;
- (July 2008) $3.5 billion LBO of The Weather Channel;
- (October 2008) $2.2 billion acquisition of Neuberger Berman, Lehman’s asset management firm
The non-US work has been plenty lucrative, too. Some of Kirkland’s recent deals for Bain:
- (November 2005) €3 billion leveraged buyout of FCI Framatome, a French connector and interconnect systems supplier;
- (June 2007) €1.5 billion buyout of Bavaria Yachts;
- (October 2007) £1.4 billion leveraged buyout of Brakes Group, the UK-based distributor of frozen, grocery and chilled foods (which was a flip by Clayton Dubilier & Rice);
- (October 2008) $3.5 billion take private of Edgars Consolidated Stores, a South African retailer;
- (December 2008) €500 million buy-out of Cerved Business Information, an Italian business information company; and
- (June 2009) $418 million investment in GOME Electrical Appliances Holding Limited, China’s largest retail enterprise.
Kirkland has even had a slice of the US pie:
- (January 2006) $2.1 billion buyout of Burlington Coat Factory;
- (June 2007) $2.1 billion buyout of Guitar Center.
Is Asia the next battleground? Kirkland just opened a Shanghai office to serve Bain’s Asia operations (see the GOME deal above), among others. Ropes is already in Hong Kong.
Law-firm ties run deep, so we’ll give the inside edge to Ropes & Gray. Bain GC Sean Doherty started his private-practice career at the firm.
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wow great list, great analysis – silent third party here is White & Case, whose London office is cratering faster than the Millenium Falcon in an asteroid field.
We touched on that in this article a few weeks ago
http://lawshucks.com/2009/09/management-shakeup-p...
love the star wars allusion… you obviously know, but for those who don't, white & case's headquarters is affectionately known as "The Death Star" because it's a big, ugly, monolithic black building on 6th ave