The group, which joins DLA Piper from Dewey & LeBoeuf, focuses its practice on corporate transactions, including finance, private equity and mergers and acquisitions, representing public and private companies, funds and institutions in a wide range of sectors around the world.
route, with a few exceptions, is probably not going to be available — and if it is available, it won't be at an interesting valuation," said Tim Gardner, a partner at the law firm Latham & Watkins in Hong Kong who specializes in private equity and mergers & acquisitions.
Geoff has practiced law for almost 20 years in the areas of corporate finance, private equity, and mergers & acquisitions, and remains Of Counsel at Smith Anderson in Raleigh, where he had been a Partner.
The bank started a hiring spree in Europe and Asia to grow its fledgling equities and merger advisory business.
ING bought Britain's Barings, but then pulled back from most of its equities and merger business, keeping only the emerging-market side, in which ING was already strong.
In the last three months, Mr. Diamond and five other executives at Barclays Capital, the investment banking unit, have gone on a hiring spree, adding more than 450 research, equities and merger advisory professionals in Europe and Asia from rivals like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
After turning Barclays Capital into one of the biggest risk management and financing firms in Europe, Mr. Diamond says he now has a unique opportunity to benefit from a decimated market and expand into equities and merger advice to compete with rivals like Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, two of his former employers.
It was in other areas where expectations were more modest, in particular equity trading and merger advice, that revenues were sharply up.Lehman Brothers has been the other star, continuing a long run of good performances stretching back to the 1990s.
JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley dominate the equity underwriting and merger advisory rankings, the most profitable investment banking lines.
UBS will fire some 500 investment bankers to compensate for a downturn in equity trading and merger activity, the world's sixth-largest bank said on Wednesday.
