Fried Frank has hired Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy City finance partner Neil Caddy as the firm continues to build up its London transactional practice.

The US firm, which last year secured the heavyweight hire of Ashar Qureshi from Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, is now targeting 30% lawyer headcount growth in its London base – with its finance practice an immediate priority.

Caddy has spent the last six and a half years at Milbank, after joining from Mayer Brown in 2012. He also previously worked at Allen & Overy, where he spent a seven-month secondment with the financial sponsors group at JPMorgan.

He advises on acquisition and other event-driven financing, as well as restructurings, and in 2015 was part of the Milbank London team that advised Dublin-based AWAS Aviation Capital on its $4bn sale of 90 aircraft to Macquarie Group.

He will join Fried Frank's London office in February and is expected to focus on advising banks, funds and corporations across a wide range of products, including bank-bond transactions, second-lien loans, mezzanine debt and private high yield.

Speaking to Legal Week, London office head Mark Mifsud and Qureshi – who now heads up Fried Frank's EMEA transactional group – said the firm will continue its push into finance, with further lateral hires expected this year.

Qureshi and Mifsud said the focus for London is to build in key areas such as finance, asset management, private equity, corporate and real estate, in line with the firm's priorities in the US.

The City office currently has 17 partners, a number Mifsud expects to increase by at least five by 2022. He added that the office's performance last year had "exceeded expectations".

"We had an incredibly busy year in 2017 and we want to build on that. Our focus is on a combination of new business and pre-existing client work – we want to build the firm's pie with new clients here," he said.

Qureshi concurred: "It's still very early on in the journey for us – we have a vision of where we want to end up. We want to keep focused on the practices in which we are strong, and we have a desire to be top of the food chain."

Following Qureshi's hire, the office also recruited Norton Rose corporate partner Ian Lopez in December, with other additions last year including Ashurst real estate partners Darren Rogers and Patrick Williams, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett asset management counsel Sam Wilson, who joined as a partner.

The recruitment push means the firm is considering whether it requires larger London premises than its current City base at 41 Lothbury, where its lease runs until 2022.

Mifsud said the firm is currently looking at its options – including a trial of open-plan office working and other uses of its existing space – before it makes a decision on its future in the building.

Qureshi, who joined Fried Frank after four years at Freshfields, said his decision to join Fried Frank came from a desire to feel he could "make more of a difference", adding that the US firm's approach was not to emulate rivals such as Kirkland & Ellis or Latham & Watkins, instead favouring a more focused gameplan.

"I don't think we will ever try to do what some US firms have done, which is try to take on the magic circle. Being best of breed is better than being ubiquitous."