Chicago-based firm Mayer Brown & Platt has shaken up its management with the appointment of a sole chairman to lead the firm.

Co-chairman Jason Kravitt has given up his post to transfer to the firm's New York office. Fellow co-chair Tyrone Fahner has taken over the chairmanship of the firm.

Fahner will now operate as sole chairman, with managing partner Deborah de Hoyas continuing to play a less senior management role.

The move, which is being seen as the result of a power struggle within the firm, is part of the consolidation of leadership in a new five-member executive committee. The executive body has been formed to speed up decision-making at the firm.

The move occurred during the firm's management committee elections this month after Fahner was tipped as the firm's preferred overall leader.

One Mayer Brown partner told Legal Week that the firm was still holding open the option of voting in another co-chair to share power with Fahner, but Chicago insiders said this was unlikely.

Although Kravitt is giving up his place at the helm of the firm, he will retain a management role in the policy and planning group.

Kravitt's departure to New York, away from Mayer Brown's centre of power in Chicago, comes at the end of a period of hard-won European expansion.

Central to the expansion in Europe was the merger with the Frankfurt office of Gaedertz, the firm which earlier this year split into three after a series of rival offers from other Anglo-Saxon firms.

Even after Mayer Brown commenced negotiations with the Gaedertz partners, the merger talks were complicated by the continued interest of other US and UK firms trying to take a part of the Frankfurt practice.

To represent this international expansion, the firm is also to widen its 10-member management group to include more European partners.

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