Irish corporate law firm William Fry chooses new managing partner

Partners at William Fry, the Dublin-headquartered corporate law firm, have elected Stephen Keogh, the firm’s head of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as its new managing partner.

Mr Keogh, a specialist in the Irish M&A market who has led the firm’s corporate law department since 2020, will replace outgoing managing partner Owen O’Sullivan, who served in the top role for four years, upon his retirement at the end of the year. Mr O’Sullivan will take on a consultancy role with William Fry following his departure, the firm said.

Appointed partner in 2005, Mr Keogh (49) did his training at the firm and also spent five years as head of William Fry’s London office.

He said he was “delighted” to have been elected to the role. “I would like to thank Owen O’Sullivan for his hard work and dedication to the firm during his time at the helm. Under his guidance we have achieved continued growth and adapted to change with an unwavering commitment to excellence and success.”

Liam McCabe, chairman of William Fry, said Mr Keogh was taking up the position “at a time when the firm is extremely well positioned to take advantage of the many opportunities afforded by a buoyant Irish economy”.

Speaking to The Irish Times, Mr Keogh said hiring in a competitive market for talent remained one of the big challenges for William Fry but conditions had improved in the past year.

“It has eased a bit because … global M&A has slowed down in the last 12 months,” he said. “That means that the big international hubs for legal services, like New York and London, aren’t hiring as voraciously as they have been. But I think one of the biggest challenges that every domestic Irish legal firm has at the moment is retaining our top people because our business is all about the talent, the people that we have providing a top service.”

On the M&A front, Mr Keogh said he expected deal-making in the Republic to continue at a decent clip in the second half of the year. “If you look at the stats, you’ll probably see that the Irish M&A market has been surprisingly resilient, last year and into this year,” he said. “So to the extent that there has been a small decline, it’s been more on the value side of things and less in the deal volume side of things.”

William Fry has acted in some of the biggest corporate tie-ups this year, including Starwood’s $850 million (€793 million) acquisition of a stake in Irish data centre operator Echelon. The firm expects fewer large-scale transactions this year than previous years.

“There’s still chunky transactions,” he said. “And there’s still decent deal volume but maybe not quite the same number of really, really large multibillion-euro deals out there.”

In April, data from Davy stockbrokers indicated that while the number of Irish M&A deals increased in the first quarter of 2024 compared with the same period in 2023, the value of deals fell by 14.4 per cent annually.