Milbank staffs up after slew of London lawyers follow Goldfinch to Allen & Overy

Paul Conley

Senior reporter

Milbank has reacted quickly after five attorneys — including veteran European CLO lawyer John Goldfinch — moved to rival law firm Allen & Overy.

“It’s never pleasant to see people leave on an unplanned basis,” says James Warbey, who heads Milbank’s Alternative Investments Group in London, “but one of the things that did reinvigorate me was the demand from people wanting to come to Milbank. We saw a lot of high-quality applicants.”

Milbank has already found two new associates for the London office and is speaking to other candidates. The firm declined to name the new associates, who are working notice periods at their current firms, but they are understood to be joining this quarter. Milbank has not yet hired at the partner level to replace Goldfinch. Spokespeople for the firm declined to comment about partner hiring.

The CLO world was abuzz earlier this year with rumours that Goldfinch was departing. He was one of the lawyers who pushed Milbank to the top of Creditflux’s European manager counsel league tables last year. But when the rumour became fact in February, the blow to the firm was larger than expected. Four other CLO lawyers departed with Goldfinch, including senior associates Adrian Kwok and Peter West, as well as Eleanor Cripps and Alexandra Wells.

Market insiders have described the reason for Goldfinch’s departure as “a unique circumstance” unrelated to performance or compensation. Milbank declined to comment on what prompted the move and Goldfinch could not be reached for comment.

Unrelated to the situation in London, Milbank is expanding in the US and has hired a senior attorney to work in Los Angeles. Andrew Keller joins the firm as special counsel. Most recently he held that same title at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. Keller is also a Milbank veteran — he spent three years there as an associate.

“He had been at Milbank before and is excited to be back,” says Sean Solis, the New York-based lead of Milbank’s global structured credit practice. “It’s really our first flag out in the West Coast in Los Angeles, where we have a very active office. It was 2021 when we last had structured folks there.”

As the table below shows, there has been a slew of CLO lawyers changing jobs in recent months. That’s at least partly because the need for experienced CLO lawyers is rising as 2024 shapes up to be a boom year for CLOs on both sides of the Atlantic.

Complicating matters is that, unlike in some other areas of the law, it can take a long time to get a young associate ready to move up internally.

“We know what the curve generally looks like for folks coming out of law school,” says Chris Duerden, a partner and the lead of Dechert’s structured credit and CLO team. “But there’s no one class or classes that teach you what we do. It’s an amalgamation of practices. And on top of that, there are all the ‘soft skills’ that take years for all of us to develop. That’s something one has to experience, and it takes time because a person needs to be exposed to a variety of different clients and different situations over a period of time. If I could snap my fingers and just have five mid-level associates with CLO expertise, that would be fantastic. But I would say all our peer firms in the space would say the same thing.”

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