King & Spalding is launching a Moscow office with four partners from White & Case and Hogan Lovells, reports The Am Law Daily.

White & Case oil and gas partner Jennifer Josefson is joining the firm in Russia alongside Hogan Lovells partners Sergey Komolov, Olga Kozyr, and Alla Naglis.

Josefson heads White & Case's oil and gas practice in Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS, while Komolov is deputy office manager for Hogan Lovells in Moscow and Kozyr and Naglis are partners in the firm's real estate and technology, media and telecoms practices.

The new office, which is scheduled to open on 23 May, will be the firm's seventeenth worldwide and its fourth in Europe, after London, Paris, and Frankfurt. The Moscow-based team will initially focus on clients in the energy, life sciences, and TMT industries.

"We've been looking at Russia for quite some time – a couple of years at least," said King & Spalding London co-managing partner Garry Pegg, who joined King & Spalding from Hogan Lovells last June. "The new office will help us grow our international transactions practice and fits in with our global energy footprint. We'll be one of the few firms with energy practices in Houston, Moscow and the Middle East."

Prior to the merger with Lovells, Kozyr managed Hogan's relationships with Gazprombank-Invest and real estate developer MirLand, while Naglis acted as local relationship partner for the US firm's global media clients including Walt Disney, Fox Broadcasting, NBC Universal, Discovery Communications and National Geographic.

At White & Case, Josefson acted for both OAO TNK-BP Holding, the high-profile Russian oil joint venture involving BP, and mining, metals and energy group En+, owned by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

"It would be wrong to look at this as us buying a book of business – it is a strategic move based on our own client base," added Pegg, who will lead a new Russia desk in the firm's London office alongside private equity co-head Mark Thompson. "The firm already has a good Russian [resume] – many of our clients do business in Russia – but this takes it to a totally new level."

The departures from Hogan Lovells mean that just one of the original Hogan partners – corporate lawyer Georgy Kalashnikov – remains at the firm in Moscow following its transatlantic merger.

White & Case declined to comment.

The Am Law Daily is a US affiliate title of Legal Week.