In a radical development, Slaughter and May has announced its first lateral partnership hire in the firm's 125 year history. Whatever next, wireless telephones?

Capital markets partner John Moore has been headhunted from MoFo for Slaughters' Hong Kong office. He was senior legal counsel at Goldman Sachs before moving on to head up Herbies’ capital markets team in Asia. And in 2011 he joined MoFo as co-head of China capital markets.

Moore joins two other newly made up partners in Slaughters' Hong Kong office, both of whom were associates at the firm. Given that Slaughters generally only makes up one or two partners a year globally, that represents a sea-change for the firm in recognising that Asia Pacific might turn out to quite important.

    Slaughters partners trying to locate the Far East, yesterday


Slaughters has traditionally focused on UK M&A, which hasn't had the best run recently. Clearly it now has both eyes on Asia - it opened in Beijing in 2009 - and will be hoping to capitalise on the Chinese love of anything with a solid gold brand.

Executive Partner, Richard Clark, told RollOnFriday "The market in Hong Kong is such that we felt we should have US capacity in order to be able fully to service our clients and, of course, we could not have acquired this without a lateral hire". Clark clarifies that "this is a market-specific case and in no way implies that we have any intentions of expanding US capacity outside Asia".
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