Adds background on attorneys in paragraphs 3 and 5
By Sara Merken
April 24 (Reuters) - Munger, Tolles & Olson is losing roughly 10% of its partnership to mega-firm Baker McKenzie, which said on Wednesday that it has hired a group of 17 transactional lawyers in Los Angeles from the smaller law firm.
The team includes 11 corporate and tax lawyers joining Baker McKenzie as partners, and six associates. Nine of the lawyers were partners at Munger Tolles, which had 84 partners prior to the group's departure, according to a Munger Tolles spokesperson.
The lawyers work across mergers and acquisitions, private equity, tax, funds and finance, Baker McKenzie said. The team represents the majority of Munger Tolles' corporate practice group.
The incoming partners are Jennifer Broder, Kimberly Chi, David Goldman, Michael Greaney, Tyler Hilton, Judith Kitano, Kelly Kriebs, David Lee, Brett Rodda, Matthew Schonholz and Nikole Zoumberakis.
Without a larger platform like Baker McKenzie's, "it was hard for us to see a path to grow our practice the way that the ambitious and entrepreneurial folks in the practice want to grow it," said Rodda, an M&A and private equity lawyer.
Chicago-founded Baker McKenzie is the largest law firm in the United States by attorney head count. The firm says it has more than 6,500 lawyers and tax professionals globally, including 2,500 deal lawyers.
Jannan Crozier, Baker McKenzie's global M&A chair, and Leif King, who leads the firm's transactional group in California, said the hires align with the firm's ambitions to build out deal work globally and on the West Coast.
Lawyers on the Munger Tolles team represented Intel on the $9 billion sale of its NAND memory chip business to SK Hynix. Baker McKenzie said other client representations include advising Berkshire Hathaway in its $11.6 billion acquisition of insurance company Alleghany, and representing Oaktree Capital Management in its sale of 62% ownership to Brookfield Asset Management in a roughly deal $4.8 billion deal.
Los Angeles-founded Munger Tolles said in a statement that it wishes the departing lawyers well, and that the firm is "on track for our best financial year in firm history."
Law firms have been hiring M&A and private equity lawyers as deal work is expected to pick up.
Rodda said his team is seeing increased transactional activity in middle-market private deals and in other areas including carve-outs.
"I think people are deciding it's time to do the deals they put on the shelf a year ago," he said.
(Reporting by Sara Merken)