Will McDonald (1) has joined Gibson Dunn as an M&A partner in London, moving from Jones Day, where he had been a partner for seven years. He worked at Jones Day for 18 years in total, and during that time spent two years on secondment to The Takeover Panel as assistant secretary, where he was involved in the regulation of more than 250 transactions, including Anheuser-Busch InBev’s 2015 £71bn takeover of SABMiller – the biggest takeover in UK corporate history.

The international law firm has also promoted Jakob Egle (2) to corporate partner in London. He is an experienced private equity lawyer who joined the law firm three years ago from Sidley Austin. Prior to that he worked for Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and had started his career with the corporate and M&A team in Vienna, Austria. 

In the US, the legal advisory firm has made five promotions to corporate partner: Maxwell Ball (3) and Elizabeth Romefelt (4) in New York; Harrison Korn (5) in Washington DC; Melanie Neary (6) in San Francisco; and Adam Whitehouse (7) in Houston. Ball has been with the firm since 2014 and Romefelt since 2019, both working in M&A. Korn has been with the firm for 10 years and also works in M&A. Neary has been with the firm eight years and advises on capital markets and life sciences. Whitehouse advises on M&A in the energy space.

In Munich, Dennis Seifarth (8) has also been promoted to M&A partner, and in Hong Kong Tyler Cohen (9) has been made private equity partner. Seifarth joined from Milbank in 2019 and Cohen from Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton & Garrison in 2021.

Burges Salmon has recruited Charles Claisse as partner in its corporate and M&A practice, based in the London office. He joins from Deloitte Legal, where he had spent four years and was head of its corporate practice. He specialises in advising on deals in the TMT sector and has experience advising on cross-border and transatlantic deals. Prior to Deloitte Legal, he spent 22 years with tech-focused law firm Kemp Little, which merged with Deloitte to form Deloitte Legal in 2021. He joined Kemp Little from Allens, having trained as a lawyer with Sidley Austin. He studied law at the University of Cambridge.

Sidley Austin has recruited Tania Bedi (1) as partner in its global finance practice from Latham & Watkins, where she spent three years and was London finance co-chair. She is the eighth partner Sidley Austin has hired from the company. 

The firm has also recruited debt capital markets partners Scott Colwell (2) and Patrick Kwak (3) from Latham, where they had spent 23 and 10 years respectively.