Beyond borders

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer is one of the premier private equity transaction legal advisors in the world, but its work in the US so far has been largely limited to advising on follow-on acquisitions and not on the primary deals it is known for elsewhere.
For example, last year in the US, Freshfields advised Apax Partners’ portfolio company Travelex on its acquisition of foreign exchange company Ruesch for $440 million (€311 million).
Elsewhere, Freshfields has advised Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Permira on its sale of broadcaster SBS to German TV station ProSieben-Sat.1 Media for €3.3 billion, Goldman Sachs’ on its acquisition of Japan’s Sanyo Credit for Y24 billion ($205 million; €145 million) and Warburg Pincus’ on its acquisition of China Hui Yuan Juice for $222 million.
Freshfields, like its European magic circle rivals Linklaters and Clifford Chance, has been seeking to expand its New York practice. The firm has been in New York for 20 years, but it was only in mid-2006 that it brought on two private equity in corporate M&A partners in Matthew Herman and Timothy Wilkins. “That’s the beginning of our building of a practice that will be complementary to our main European and Asian corporate practice in doing private equity transaction work,” says Chris Bown, co-head of the international private equity practice at Freshfields in London.
Now a third partner has been added to the New York corporate practice – Julian Pritchard, a transfer from Tokyo – and there will be more hires to come as the firm seeks to deepen its relationships with its clients.
Freshfields says it has relationships with some 30 of the world’s 40 largest private equity funds in terms of size, but many of those relationships are down to a piece of the work done by one of its many offices.
What Freshfields wants is a bigger piece of the action, if not all of it. “Our objective for the next five years is to seek to develop stronger and deeper relationships with the sponsors with whom we work, with a view to ending up with a dozen to 15 strong multi-office relationships with a variety of private equity sponsors,” says Bown.
With half of its clients based in the US and the other half in Europe, New York will be an important piece of the big picture. Bown expects to see a bigger flow of domestic private equity work in the next six to twelve months, and eventually hopes to build a team of 4 to 5 partners and 15 to 20 associates.
Over in Asia, where the firm has been hit with a continuous round of departures at the top, some stability has prevailed. In June this year, IPO specialist Teresa Ko was appointed as managing partner for China, where she heads a practice of nearly 200 lawyers in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai.