Ex-Kirkland Star Schiele Bets on Paul Hastings’ M&A Practice

An ex-Kirkland & Ellis dealmaker faces an uphill climb as he aims to help Paul Hastings compete with an elite tier of Wall Street M&A firms.

The challenge for Eric Schiele is to replicate the success he had at Kirkland, where he led the firm’s biggest deal last year. Schiele said he is confident he will help Paul Hastings make gains even without his ex-firm’s associates or partners at his side.

“More than anything else, I want to make sure we get more than our fair share of high profile deals,” Schiele said in an interview. “I want to move up the league tables.”

Schiele’s hire in March shows the extent to which big firms will pay up to try to join the top ranks of dealmaking. Rainmakers at his level have commanded salaries as high as $20 million, though Schiele’s pay hasn’t been disclosed.

Paul Hastings, which has been on a hiring partner spree, was not among the top 20 M&A legal advisers over the first half of the year, according to Bloomberg’s league tables. The firm’s largest deal was guiding GTCR Golder Rauner LLC as regulatory counsel in its sale of Worldpay Inc. to Global Payments Inc. for nearly $24.3 billion.

Latham & Watkins led the mergers and acquisitions charts for the first half of the year with about $269 billion in deals. Kirkland, which was the top firm last year, and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz followed in second and third place, respectively. Paul Hastings fell back in the rankings after snagging the 20th spot in the first quarter.

Read more: Click here for a list of the Top 20 firms and an interactive graphic with the deals they won.

Schiele led snack food maker Kellanova’s $36 billion sale to Mars Inc., Kirkland’s largest deal last year. Now at Paul Hastings, he’s counting an environment where companies have been increasingly willing to follow lawyers instead of relying on brand names of firms.

“Clients stay with lawyers as much as they stay with firms,” said Schiele, who did not discuss specific clients. “That old collection of New York firms that historically had a really dominant position in public company M&A has become more fragmented. Wachtell has held its position very well, but the market is not four or five firms on speed dial any more.”

Hiring Binge

The Schiele hire is part of Paul Hastings’ effort to aggressively hire lawyers from rivals. The firm acquired 215 lawyers last year, according to data from Firm Prospects, which tracks hires. Besides Kirkland, the firm has also added lawyres from competitors like Latham, White & Case, Vinson & Elkins, and Weil Gotshal & Manges.

Frank Lopez, the firm’s chairman, said in an interview last month that Paul Hastings is on pace to grow revenue 12% this year to more than $2.5 billion. Practices including antitrust, litigation, finance, M&A and restructuring are up more than 30%, he said.

Schiele said he sees the deals side of the firm’s work carrying its momentum into the back half of the year.

Eric Schiele

Firm handout

“There is huge pent up deal demand because there were certain industries that were very gun shy as a result of the last administration’s regulatory policies,” he said. “It’s going to hit like GrubHub’s deal in 2020 when the M&A market went from dormant to absolutely out of control.”

Energy will be the source of an “enormous amount of M&A” as clients focus on artificial intelligence and power is sought for data centers, Schiele said. Energy, including clean energy initiatives and oil and gas, racked up $122.7 billion in pending and completed deal volume in the first half of the year, Bloomberg league tables show, placing it among technology, financials and industrials as a top sector.

‘Closed’ Texas

A potential influx of energy transactions also shifts the focus to Texas, which is a “relatively closed” market, Schiele said. Paul Hastings more than tripled its Texas headcount since 2023 and expanded its Dallas and Houston office spaces.

Firms need to have “substantial boots on the ground to get a lot of business there,” he said. “You need to be in the ecosystem, not just in the state, but also in and around the energy industry.”

Eduardo Gallardo, who joined Paul Hastings’ Manhattan office in 2022 from Gibson Dunn & Crutcher before becoming the sole M&A practice leader, now acts as co-chair with Schiele. Gallardo’s deal list includes guiding Pactiv Evergreen Inc. in its sale announced last year to Apollo Global Management Inc.-owned packaging company Novolex (which was steered by Paul Weiss) for $6.7 billion.

Schiele in his co-leader role said he plans to bulk up firm teams that support M&A transactions, such as tax and regulatory, by hiring fourth- to sixth-year associates. He’s also watching out for potential conflicts that may arise between his new firm and existing clients.

“Any time you make a move, you’ve got to brace yourself,” Schiele said. “You can know who all your clients are, but you don’t know who all your clients’ counterparties are—there’s only so much hedging and preparation we can do for that.”