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Two partners at Wachtell Lipton, the New York-based corporate law powerhouse, have left for Latham & Watkins as a war for talent intensifies in a busy market stoked by the Trump administration.
Mark Stagliano, a mergers and acquisitions specialist, and Emily Johnson, a debt financing expert, are joining Latham as partners in the New York office, the firm said in a statement on Saturday.
The duo join two other Wachtell partners who have left for Latham in the past year, John Sobolewski and Zachary Podolsky. Latham confirmed the hires after the FT reported that an announcement was imminent.
Latham, whose roots are in Los Angeles but which has become a global player, has been aggressively hiring lawyers in both traditional M&A as well as capital markets and restructuring in an effort to catch up to Kirkland & Ellis, the highest grossing law firm in the world by revenue. Latham is ranked second.
This week, David Nemecek, a Kirkland veteran widely regarded as the leading US debt financing lawyer, announced he would be leaving the firm to join Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Simpson had hired Allison Preiss, an M&A partner from Wachtell, this year
Marc Jaffe, Latham’s New York managing partner, said in a statement that the former Wachtell duo’s “range of skills and sought-after expertise significantly expands our already strong and growing platform and the best-in-class counsel we provide to our clients”.
Wachtell, known for its modest size of only a few hundred lawyers and high pay, rarely suffers high-level defections. However, in recent years, a handful of partners have left in an active transfer market where top recruits can get annual guaranteed pay greater than $20mn per year.
Wachtell is one of the last firms to utilise a “lockstep” system where partners are paid based on their tenure, though its actual remuneration is well ahead of even other top New York “white shoe” firms.
Last year, Wachtell had a banner year surfing a boom in megadeals to advise on more than $600bn of transactions in the US, close to the amount of the far larger Kirkland and Latham, according to LSEG data.
Wachtell is advising Warner Bros Discovery on its high-profile sale, over which Netflix and Paramount are still scrapping. It also advised Norfolk Southern on its $85bn sale to railroad behemoth Union Pacific and video game maker Electronic Arts on its $55bn sale to a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
Stagliano advised T-Mobile on its $150bn merger with Sprint and the $11bn sale of medical device maker Hill-Rom to Baxter International. Johnson has designed multibillion-dollar M&A financing packages for the likes of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Diamondback Energy.
Wachtell did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
