Key Takeaway
Latham & Watkins is understood to have hired Gibson Dunn London real estate private equity partner Patrick Hennessy, ten months after taking Jeremy Kenley from the same bench. Neither firm has confirmed. The point is not the headcount. Both lawyers act for Apollo and Brookfield, and Latham has spent the year rebuilding a real estate practice it partly lost to Sidley Austin, including its own former global real estate co-chair.
Latham & Watkins has gone back to Gibson Dunn withPatrick Hennessy, an English-qualified partner in Gibson Dunn’s London office, is understood to be joining Latham’s London real estate practice. Neither firm has confirmed it. Hennessy’s Gibson Dunn bio was still live at the time of writing.
If it lands, it is the second time in under a year that Latham has taken a partner from the same small bench. Jeremy Kenley made the same journey in November 2025.
Look at what the two men actually carry. Kenley was general counsel for global real estate at Apollo before returning to private practice, and Brookfield is a client.
Hennessy led the Gibson Dunn London team that advised Apollo funds on the Gatehouse Living Group acquisition, and acted for Brookfield on the sale of its Iberian student accommodation platform.
Latham has not hired two real estate lawyers, but has bought the same two relationships twice, which is a rather more efficient use of a recruitment budget.
Hennessy’s practice covers cross-border real estate private equity, corporate real estate M&A, joint ventures, co-investments and leveraged buyouts across the UK, Europe and Asia. He was elected to the Gibson Dunn partnership in the round announced in late 2021.
The strategic logic has been stated on the record. When Kenley arrived, London managing partner Ed Barnett called expanding the City real estate capability a strategic priority. Global real estate chair Douglas Heitner said in January that the firm was building the preeminent global real estate practice, which is the sort of thing chairs say, though Latham has been spending like it means it.
What makes the rebuilding framing more interesting than the raiding one is the traffic in the other direction. In January, Sidley Austin hired Jeremy Trinder, Latham’s own former global real estate co-chair. That was the eleventh Latham partner Sidley had taken in London in eighteen months. Recruitment data put Latham among the heaviest London lateral losers in the opening months of 2026.
So the Gibson Dunn hires are not empire-building from a standing start. They are replacement stock.
Cleary Gottlieb and Milbank
The wider City picture supports the price Latham appears willing to pay. Cleary Gottlieb and Milbank both launched European real estate practices in London last October. Freshfields has added partners from Ropes & Gray and Hogan Lovells. White & Case took a three-partner real estate team out of DLA Piper in Paris. Latham itself hired three from A&O Shearman in January, two of them real estate finance specialists.
Everyone is buying the same thing at once, being lawyers who work across property, finance and private capital rather than in one of the three. Digital infrastructure and logistics mandates need all of it, and the firms that can only do the property bit are watching the work go past.
Gibson Dunn, for its part, retains Alan Samson, Richard Sen, Isabel Berger, Sean Tierney and Claibourne Harrison in London. Whether it stays that way depends on whether anyone else in Hennessy’s team decides the journey is worth taking.
