Arnold & Porter has poached Jones Day's head of international tax, Richard Andersen, for its New York office.
Andersen, who was actively recruited by Arnold & Porter, has joined the firm as partner and will be heading up the practices transactional tax team. According to Andersen, Arnold & Porter offered an appealing combination of professional satisfaction and career growth opportunities.
He says: "It's a very high quality firm with an unusually well developed business plan in terms of its transactional focus. It struck me, and continues to strike me, as a very well managed firm and one that thinks very clear-headedly about the future of the market, and its role in it."
Arnold & Porter is focusing on a number of key industry sectors, notably; life sciences, technology, media and the new economy. Growing industries, which offer a variety of challenging work.
"Cutting edge transactional work is the bread and butter for people like me. As a tax lawyer I don't fall in or out of love with a particular kind of client. It is more that areas that tend to be dynamic and growing, like life-sciences and e-commerce, tend to throw off relatively large quantities of relatively interesting work."
He believes that while Arnold & Porter is less than twice the size of Jones Day, clients can benefit from the smaller size.
"As far as the proliferation of megafirms is concerned, it's not easily apparent to me that the clients really benefit. I think, when it comes to size and geographic dispersion and the ways in which headcount numbers are achieved - particularly when firms feel they have to do it quickly - there can be some quality control and some service issues that my clients tell me worry them.
"There are obvious advantages of scale, I just don't think that they're unlimited."
At Arnold & Porter, his work will mainly be supporting transaction lawyers rather than developing a standalone tax practice, an approach that he agrees with:
"There is the opportunity to grow a tax centred practice, but it is a secondary aim right now. The New York office's stated objective is, first and foremost, to support the transactional practice. It's very much market driven.
"Clients want to do deals and, although it pains me to say this, tax is the tail end of the dog. Clients want transactional support, and tax is an important part of that, but it tends not to pull the train.
"Tax has always been a critical part of a deal, but as the number of deals and the number of zeros increases, the scope for tax savings grows proportionally."
Andersen's day to day work will be much the same as at Jones Day, but he will have a more balanced mix of international and domestic work. Something that he is looking forward to.
"I've made my career in the international arena and hope to continue to do so. But one of the down sides of practising in a very large tax department is that when you have an area of expertise, you tend to be pigeonholed into it. The idea of being given the opportunity to break out of that box a little bit was one of the psychological motivations that led me to make the move."
Richard Hubbard, head of tax, at Arnold & Porter, says of Andersen's recruitment:
"We've been looking for a long time to get a tax lawyer like Richard into the New York office. We were lucky to get him and it was a good time to get him. Our transactional practice in New York has continued to increase and we've been serving it though DC, but having Richard in New York will make us a lot more efficient."
