DLA Piper boosts London Private Equity offering with key partner hire

DLA Piper today announces the appointment of private equity (PE) lawyer Piero Carbone as a partner in its Corporate practice, based in London.

Piero will be joining the firm in September from McDermott Will & Emery, where he has been a partner since 2016.

Piero’s experience spans the full private equity spectrum. He advises sponsors on buyouts, public-to-privates, growth and venture investments as well as buy-and-build transactions. He also advises fund managers on multi-jurisdictional fund raisings. His clients include US and European private equity firms and fund managers focusing on a variety of industries, including financial services, real estate, technology, hospitality, healthcare and consumer goods.

Commenting, Bob Bishop, Global Co-Chair of DLA Piper's Corporate Group, said: “Private equity is a core pillar of our international Corporate practice. Piero’s appointment brings additional depth to our London team, both for transactions and fund raisings, and his wealth of experience executing cross-border deals will accelerate the integration of our market leading pan-European PE offering. He has strong client relationships in the UK and Europe, and will work closely with our existing team to capitalise further on market opportunities that we are seeing across our practice.”

Tim Wright, Head of European Private Equity at DLA Piper, added: “Piero is a strategic hire for our European Private Equity practice, working as he does with a range of PE houses across the European deal landscape. He is going to be a great addition to our existing team of over 80 European private equity partners and will further extend our market leading position across Europe.”

DLA Piper has one of the world's leading Private Equity practices and is ranked as the top legal advisor in Europe for overall private equity deal volume, according to Mergermarket's 2019 and H1 2020 league tables. DLA Piper is also the only law firm to rank amongst the top five most active (by global deal volume) for each of private equity, venture capital and M&A (PitchBook). 2019 marked the third consecutive year that DLA Piper achieved this recognition.

Over the last six months, DLA Piper has advised clients such as The Carlyle Group, LDC, Montefiore, Resource Partners and Sun European Partners on multiple private equity deals across Europe. In London alone, the firm has advised on eight private equity deals since the beginning of May, including most recently advising management on the EUR3,2 billion buyout of IFS (enterprise software) and the USD6,8 billion merger of CPA (IP software and tech-enabled services) with Clarivate Plc.

Piero’s hire follows the firm’s recent onboarding of a number of other private equity partners, including Andrew Phillips from Eversheds (UK), Marek Sawicki and Jakub Marcinkowski from CMS (Poland), Michael Heene from Linklaters (Belgium) and Simon Vogel from Dentons (Germany), in addition to five internal partner promotions in European private equity over the last two years.