Simmons & Simmons is set to recruit a team of finance partners from Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP).

The team is believed to include John Hayward and Mark Waghorn, with three further partners understood to be in discussions to follow the pair to Simmons. BLP has confirmed that Hayward and Waghorn have left the firm.

Hayward specialises in leveraged finance, including management buyouts and public-to-private transactions, and acts for banks, private equity houses and borrowers, while Waghorn's practice focuses on property finance, corporate recovery and turnaround work.

Both Hayward and Waghorn left BLP at the end of April, although Waghorn was due to continue as a consultant with the firm and hand over his client work. He joined BLP in 1990 and made partner in 1997, taking on the head of real estate finance role between 1999 and 2009.

BLP's finance team has recently been the subject of a review led by the firm's head of finance head Matthew Kellett. Legal Week reported in March that BLP is to restructure its finance practice around more profitable areas of work. The firm's finance practice had 42 partners and 120 other fee earners in London when the review was announced in March.

The practice advises clients including RBS, Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, Wilmington Trust, Tesco, Philips and Capita.

Meanwhile, Simmons' finance practice is now headed by City capital markets partner Jonathan Hammond after former head Jeremy Hoyland took over the firmwide managing partner role earlier this month (1 May).

Financial institutions is the largest sector group at Simmons, which operates along four sector lines that run across practice groups.

The sector group counted for more than half of the firm's income in the last three years and also holds the largest number of key client relationships, including Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, RBS, Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan.