For the second year running, Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine has ranked Sidley Austin as the leading legal adviser to the hedge fund industry.
For the second year running, Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine has ranked Sidley Austin as the leading legal adviser to the hedge fund industry. The firm was also named first in various sub-categories including business planning, client service, hedge fund expertise and regulatory and compliance.
‘We are particularly gratified by the results of this year’s Alpha Awards because we have once again been chosen by our clients,’ says Thomas Cole, chairman of Sidley Austin’s executive committee.
‘We have been privileged to work with some of the most respected hedge funds and alternative asset managers and we are very proud of the performance of our team, which this ranking acknowledges.’
The Alpha Awards are tabulated from the responses of nearly 1,000 hedge fund firms accounting for some USD1.4trn in assets under management, including Alpha’s 2007 Hedge Fund 100 list of the top-performing firms.
This year Alpha introduced a new ranking of advisers serving hedge fund managers with assets of USD1bn or more, in which Sidley Austin was ranked first. The firm’s hedge fund and investment management practice comprises 95 lawyers in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hong Kong and London.
The team, headed by Michael Schmidtberger and John MacKinnon in New York and William Kerr in Chicago, provides a full range of legal services to hedge fund managers, including advice on legal structure and other formation issues, securities and derivatives regulatory and compliance matters, capital markets and corporate finance transactions, seed capital transactions, hedge fund manager mergers and acquisitions, marketing arrangements, trading documentation, exchange listing, and tax matters.
Sidley Austin is one of the world’s largest full-service law firms, with more than 1,800 lawyers practising in 16 US and international cities including Beijing, Brussels, Frankfurt, Geneva, Hong Kong, London, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo.