King & Spalding Rehires Partner Duo as Milbank Move Crumbles (2)

King & Spalding has rehired two structured finance partners who last year moved to Milbank, unraveling a group hire by the New York-based law firm that last month saw another partner depart for Kirkland & Ellis.

Partners Katie Weiss and Martin Eid are returning to King & Spalding’s Manhattan office, the firm said Monday. The pair had been part of a three-partner group who left King & Spalding for Milbank in April last year.

Michael Urschel, the third partner in that move, left Milbank in May for a partner role at Kirkland & Ellis. Urschel is leaving the lender-side structured finance practice he developed with Weiss and Eid to build out a borrower-side practice at Kirkland.

Weiss and Eid remain lender-side advisers on “esoteric” capital markets securitizations, King & Spalding said in a statement, including whole-business, digital infrastructure and media royalties securitizations. The duo also advise in the private credit market.

Milbank declined to comment.

For King & Spalding, the hires help bolster its finance practice after the departure of roughly 20 lawyers to Paul Hastings earlier this month. The Atlanta-founded firm last week also added five finance partners in London from Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft.

“Asset-backed credit, including the form of complex securitization Katie and Martin are so skilled in, is experiencing strong growth as banks and asset managers look for innovative ways to meet the demand of private credit funds in search of assets,” Carolyn Alford, head of King & Spalding’s finance and restructuring practice, said in a statement.

The Urschel-Weiss-Eid group had won industry awards at both King & Spalding and Milbank before splitting up. In April, Milbank announced the team had closed a dozen esoteric securitization transactions this year across a range of asset classes. The deals include whole-business securitizations of franchise royalties, a structured financing of outdoor advertising receivables, data center revenues and digital infrastructure securitizations.

The split appears amicable, according to a LinkedIn exchange. Weiss and Eid seem to have taken the reins of that successful lender-side practice, choosing to bring it back to King & Spalding.

When Urschel joined Kirkland, he wrote on LinkedIn that Eid and Weiss had his “support and friendship as they steward the wonderful lender and underwriter practice we built together,” adding that he looked forward to working with the pair “across the table.”

Eid and Weiss responded by congratulating him on the new job, writing that they looked forward to building the lender-side practice he founded.

“We are excited to be rejoining our friends and former colleagues at King & Spalding and to bring our practice back to this strong and growing platform, with leading finance and private credit teams and the firm’s significant commitment to continuing to grow them,” Weiss said in a statement.

In an interview, Eid confirmed the King & Spalding team will work across the table from Urschel in his new role at Kirkland.

“He remains a true friend and a great person to collaborate with,” Eid said of Urschel. “In our deals, a lot of the times, you have great relationships with all of the issuer-side counsel, and a lot of times you collaborate with each other.”

The move to King & Spalding came after the partners evaluated their options following Urschel’s departure, Eid said. The firm was looking to grow its New York office and bolster its structured finance practice, Eid said.

“Because of all those things, and in addition to knowing the partners and working with people our clients knew, it became kind of a feeling of returning home, which was very attractive to us,” Eid said, noting that the group’s “key client relationships” would port over with the group to his new firm.

Urschel’s addition to Kirkland’s 300-lawyer debt finance practice will help the firm respond to “greater demand for structured products across private equity, credit, infrastructure, fund finance and other core areas of our transactional practice,” Jon Ballis, the firm’s chairman, said in a statement at the time.