After a run of departures, will Simmons make good on its promise in corporate?

Simmons & Simmons' corporate practice has long been viewed as the struggling child in a family of high performers in finance and litigation. Ask City rivals about its corporate performance and you often you get the same answer: Simmons is a great firm full of really good lawyers, but it is inexplicably failing to translate its strengths into a more substantial corporate practice.

Such claims have been brought once more to the fore by a recent spate of departures – four partners in as many months from the City practice. The recent run of exits began in October when former head of energy David Shasha joined Gowlings and longstanding partner Richard May resigned – to recently reappear at the City arm of US law firm Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson. Last week, CMS Cameron McKenna announced the hire of diversity champion and US securities partner Daniel Winterfeldt as head of international capital markets and, in the same week, White & Case confirmed it was recruiting up-and-coming M&A partner Gavin Weir.

Though Winterfeldt was high-profile, arguably the most significant loss is that of Weir, who joined the firm from Allen & Overy (A&O) in 2006. One former Simmons partner says: "Weir [was] the blue-eyed boy, perceived to be the corporate department star. Gavin's departure has seriously hit morale in the team."

The view is shared by several Simmons corporate partners, but there are also other factors at play. Simmons has been quietly reorganising its corporate practice, with a team shake-up being put into practice during last summer. The firm then realigned its corporate practice into four main teams: private M&A; public M&A; equity capital markets (ECM); and asset management and private equity.

Corporate head Mark Curtis comments: "The underlying story with the practice is that we are focusing our efforts on where we see that the growth is. For some people, that does not fit. Others think it does not happen quickly enough. Departures happen during the course of business and they happen to everyone, especially in periods of change."

One ex-partner criticises this approach, making the case that a firm with 15 corporate partners in the Square Mile is over-stretching itself to divide the team and should have instead added more partners when the firm was growing strongly during the boom.

But outgoing managing partner Mark Dawkins (pictured) retorts: "I don't agree with that at all. We continued to make very good lateral hires even in the teeth of the recession. Some mistakenly think we should be a magic circle lookalike that competes on size. That's the last thing we want."

Two key clients for the practice are service company Veolia and Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica, but the firm says it is now also making inroads in corporate with financial institutions clients such as JP Morgan Cazenove and UBS. This is being led by partners Chris Horton and Colin Bole – respectively hired from legacy Lovells and A&O – who are targeting ECM advisory work from Simmons' very respectable array of banking clients. The firm is also focusing on corporate work in the media sector, not least through the addition of Ashurst partner Andrew McMillan last year.

Still, it seems fair to say that Simmons is yet to entirely define its own space in the corporate market, an issue some ironically see as due to the shadow cast by its successful financial markets team. It will be a key task for the firm's managing partner-elect and outgoing head of finance, Jeremy Hoyland, and the firm's yet-to-be-elected new senior partner, to strike that balance.