Davis Polk Hires Show Big Law Optimism in London Market

Davis Polk & Wardwell has officially brought on a restructuring duo from Sidley Austin in London, punctuating the law firm’s year-long investment in the UK financial hub.

Jifree Cader and Mark Knight, who co-led Sidley’s restructuring group in Europe, join Davis Polk on Monday. The pair, who had left Kirkland & Ellis for Sidley in 2016, will co-head the firm’s London restructuring practice and will be joined by “several” new counsel and associates, according to Davis Polk.

The duo represented Sunac China Holdings Ltd. in its $10.2 billion offshore debt restructuring in 2023, the largest offshore restructuring completed by a Chinese property group. “I’m excited to join such an elite firm with a clear strategy to grow its London platform,“ Cader said in a statement.

The hires show Big Law optimism about prospects in London, and for Davis Polk they mark a new piece of its expansion. The firm, which has been in London for more than a half century, started an English Law practice in 2012 with four partners focused on corporate finance, but didn’t make partner hires for nearly a decade until bringing on four laterals last year.

“They’ve made some pretty good hires in terms of people that have got a track record of building business at top firms,” said Chris Clark, director of London’s Definitum Search. “They’ve picked off the right type of individuals.”

Investment returns in Europe will be attractive over the coming years as firms position teams to take advantage of an expected uptick in transactional activity, Neil Barr, Davis Polk’s managing partner, said in an interview.

“Our general ambitions for a scaled office and the size of our team were not in line” going into 2024, he said. “We’ve taken exceptional first steps.”

The firm invested in a UK corporate practice focused primarily on private capital as an anchoring asset class for expansion, Barr said. It also has a US law capital markets team in London and has built out private equity, leveraged finance, and restructuring groups.

The firm’s 31,800-square-foot office in The Whittington Building, where Davis Polk plans to move in September, “is indicative of our desire to be a preeminent London offering,” Barr said.

‘Feeding Frenzy’

Davis Polk is among a number of US law firms that joined “the private capital feeding frenzy” in the last year, said Scott Gibson, a director at UK-based legal recruitment consultancy Edwards Gibson.

Kirkland, Latham & Watkins, Paul Weiss Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and Sidley made hires, as did old-line US firms like, Sullivan & Cromwell and Cravath, Swaine & Moore, which traditionally haven’t delved much into the lateral market.

There were 548 lateral partner hires in London in 2024, according to a year-end report by Gibson’s firm. Kirkland and Paul Weiss were among the most acquisitive.

US firms have focused on leveraged finance, private equity, private funds, restructuring, and support areas such as tax and antitrust, Gibson said. They also have made inroads in disputes, thanks to litigation funding, he said.

Cravath brought on Linklaters leveraged finance duo Rohan Saha and Chris Medley in London, while Sullivan & Cromwell added private equity partner Karan Dinamani from Allen & Overy in 2023.

Market Share

Davis Polk’s first hire was Luke McDougall, who co-led the global finance group at Paul Hastings. He was a “great hire” who helped build his former firm’s finance practice from the ground up, Definitum’s Clark said. A&O Shearman private equity partner Gordon Milne came aboard in August.

Davis Polk lost one partner—Dan Hirschovits to Paul Hastings—during the same period. Gibson said it was probably not a great loss for the firm in the short term, as equity capital markets have been all but dead in London for a few years.

In contrast to Paul Weiss, which took a larger market share in London at a massive cost, “Davis Polk and its Wall Street peers like Cravath have approached lateral hiring with conservatism,” Clark said. The firms have been “picking up key individuals to slowly build practices around—without hiring a massive group of people,” he said.

New York-based firms enacted equity structure changes that enabled the hiring, Gibson said. Davis Polk and Cravath moved to a modified lockstep model, which can factor in performance rather than strictly seniority, and Cravath and Paul Weiss adopted nonequity partner tiers.

“They couldn’t have hired like that in the past—their structures wouldn’t have enabled them,” Gibson said.

Looking Ahead

London hiring may tighten this year, Gibson said. “We don’t know if there are that many more teams they can hire,” he said, noting that many London legal groups have already made multiple lateral moves in whole or in part.

The threat of tariffs can potentially have an inflationary impact, meaning interest rates will need to go up, and that will stop a lot of lateral activity in London, Gibson said. That would affect strategies of US firms in London because private capital and litigation funding markets are predicated on low rates, he said.

Clark is more optimistic. “There’s a lot of appetite to take on risk, whereas firms previously, including UK and US firms, were not straying too far out in their lane,” he said.

If there’s a business case, there could be more reactive than strategic lateral hiring, which will allow US firms to capitalize on their market positions, Clark said. “The fact that we’re seeing more movement between US firms in London speaks volumes with the credibility and the depth that they have in this market,” he said.

Davis Polk will focus in the short-term on integrating its new team, but it isn’t ruling out further expansion. “We have a client base and a platform that can be a little bit more scaled, and so in 2025 we’ll be thinking about that,” Barr said.