Travers Smith has made its first US-qualified partner hire, bringing in Clifford Chance (CC) Milan partner Charles Casassa for its City practice.

Casassa is due to join Travers' London corporate practice next month from the Milan office of CC, where he has been a partner since 2008.

Casassa specialises in capital markets transactions and also has experience of M&A, structured finance, and acquisition finance.

The hire marks a departure for Travers, which until now has not had any US qualified partners, instead relying on a network of referral relationships in the US with firms including Sidley Austin and Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison.

The firm expects to take on a number of associates to work with Casassa but currently has no further plans to expand further at partner level.

Casassa takes the number of partners in Travers' City corporate practice to 18 and the total number of partners in London to 61.

Travers corporate head Chris Hale said: "We've always had quite a big equity capital markets practice here and over recent years more and more offerings in this area have had a US component requiring US law input.

"The way we have previously handled this is to team up with US firms, but we've had a very strong message from clients now that that won't do anymore and that we need our own US law capability for this practice area. We will continue to work with our US relationship firms in other practice areas."