King & Spalding's London office has hired Linklaters partner Tom O'Neill and Latham & Watkins counsel Markus Bauman to its European capital markets practice.

The recruitment of the two US-qualified securities lawyers means King & Spalding has added four new partners in the City in just over a month, following the hire of Bingham McCutchen restructuring partner Elisabeth Baltay and the promotion of arbitration lawyer Ruth Byrne.

Both O'Neill and Bauman advise investment banks, corporates, sponsors and investors on public and private cross-border transactions, initial public offerings high-yield debt offerings and other SEC-registered debt and equity offerings.

The partners will work closely with King & Spalding's London and New York corporate teams.

At Linklaters, O'Neill advised on equity offerings for the Thomas Cook group, Coca-Cola HBG, and Direct Line. Last year he acted for the underwriting banks on the Government's £1.9bn privatisation of the Royal Mail.

He was based at the magic circle firm's Paris office for seven years, and headed Linklaters' Turkey desk.

Bauman, who recently seconded to the debt capital markets department of JP Morgan, was previously executive director of the investment banking legal department at Goldman Sachs.

At Latham, he advised on Telefonica Deutschland's €3.62bn rights offering to fund the acquisition of E-Plus, as well Telefonica's €1.45bn IPO in 2012.
King & Spalding has been one of the most active firms in the London lateral market in the last two years, more than doubling its fee-earner headcount to 51 since the start of 2012.

In order to cope with the extra numbers, the firm is taking on an additional 6,000 square feet of space in its 125 Old Broad Street headquarters, amounting to 25 per cent extra capacity.