Sherman & Sterling has hired leveraged finance partner Gary Hamp from Latham & Watkins to bolster its London finance practice.

Hamp returns to the city after more than a decade in Hong Kong, with the last five years spent at Latham having initially moved there with Hogan Lovells, where he was head of banking for more than six years. Hamp is the latest in a series of moves by corporate and finance partners to leave Hong Kong and return to London.

He is expected to work closely with Shearman insolvency partner Alex Wood, who joined the firm from Weil Gotshal & Manges in July. The firm’s senior partner, David Beveridge, said Hamp’s skills and experience would strengthen the English law component of the firm’s transatlantic leveraged finance offering.

That offering is headed by Ward McKimm, who returned to the firm from Freshfields in 2018. Other recent additions to the finance team include US hires Alan Rockwell and Michael Chernick from Allen & Overy.

McKimm, who is also the firm’s European managing partner, praised Hamp’s “energy, enthusiasm and experience”, saying the move indicated his and Beveridge’s commitment to expanding the global leveraged practice despite the recent departures of EMEA head of finance Peter Hayes and restructuring partner Mei Lian to Paul Hastings.

Nathanson joins Greenberg

Greenberg Traurig, meanwhile, has hired finance and restructuring partner Helena Nathanson from Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner. 

Nathanson, who has held leadership roles at BCLP and Dorsey & Witney, is a strategic hire for the US firm, which has built up capabilities in London of late with the arrival of four banking litigators from Mishcon de Reya and the addition of former Baker & McKenzie restructuring head Ian Jack.

Nathanson will work closely with litigation and restructuring colleagues, as well as corporate lawyers. She has wide experience of trustee and agents work, including within distress-led insolvency situations, having represented the majority of the corporate trust houses in London.

Richard Rosenbaum, Greenberg’s executive chairman, said: “She has a resilient practice consistent with GT colleagues… in corporate trust work in the United States, and is a welcome complement to our recent top level London additions.”

Rosenbaum added that with Nathanson’s arrival “we have further rounded out our London capabilities with a delightful individual entirely suited to our culture. We are even more ready for whichever way markets may turn in these uncertain times.”

Nathanson has held strong representative roles for corporate trustees in Schemes of Arrangement, alongside restructurings, consent solicitations and debt variations. She said she was looking forward to helping clients navigate all such transactions, whatever their complexity, while Greenberg’s corporate co-chair, Fiona Adams, who heads its London office, said the firm’s corporate group continued to grow, “even amidst the current challenges of a global pandemic.”