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by Baz Hiralal
Stoking years-old initial public offering rumors, Twitter Inc. hired Morgan Stanley's Cynthia Gaylor to head corporate development, the real-time information network announced in a tweet. Gaylor was a managing director at Morgan Stanley since December 2009, advising technology clients on mergers and acquisitions and financing activities, including IPOs, follow-on offerings and equity linked, private placement and debt security transactions. Her LinkedIn page notes past clients included Workday Inc., ServiceNow Inc., Palo Alto Networks Inc., Facebook Inc., Infoblox Inc., Splunk Inc., Zynga Inc., Jive Software Inc., Netflix Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. Prior to joining Morgan Stanley in March 2006, Gaylor spent more than a decade at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Hambrecht & Quist.
Twitter's valuation has been estimated at up to $10 billion. EMarketer Inc. projected its global ad revenue to be $582 million this year and $1.33 billion in 2015.
In New York, UBS tapped Jim Voorheis as head of specialty finance, Americas. He will join in July and also work in the financial institutions group. He replaces Halle Bennett, who left the firm. Voorheis will arrive from Deutsche Bank AG and was previously a managing director at Citigroup Inc.
Piper Jaffray & Co. tapped Romy McCarthy as a managing director in its public finance investment banking group in Milwaukee. She spent 19 years as a public finance investment banker in Ziegler's healthcare and senior living groups.
Palmer Square Capital Management LLC took on Jeffrey D. Fox as an executive director. He was a managing director in fixed income at Sandler O'Neill and Partners LP, focusing on the structuring and sales of several products, including collateralized loan obligations. Before that, he was at Société Générale SA as a director in global markets advisory, working on its U.S. collateralized debt and loan obligation and residential mortgage-backed securities credit advisory effort.
Fox was also an executive director in the FAST organization at JPMorgan Chase & Co./Bear, Stearns & Co., where he structured trust preferred CDOs and CLOs. Also at Bear, he managed the global CDO analytics desk, which included credit modeling of various asset classes.
Lutz Englisch will join Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP's Munich office as a partner. He was head of corporate for Germany for Ashurst LLP. Before that, Englisch was head of the corporate legal mergers and acquisitions group at Siemens AG.
Venable LLP announced that Allyson Baker joined the firm as a partner in its Washington office. Baker comes in from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where she was among the initial team of enforcement attorneys who helped formulate agency policies regarding investigations and litigation in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Prior to joining the CFPB in 2011, Baker was a trial attorney in the Department of Justice's civil tax division.
D.A. Davidson & Co. agreed to combine with Los Angeles brokerage and money management firm Crowell, Weedon & Co. Andrew Crowell will continue to manage the division and report to Jim Kerr, president of Davidson Cos. Crowell Weedon will be part of D.A. Davidson's individual investor group. Last year, D.A. Davidson tacked on McGladrey Capital Markets LLC.
New York State Supreme Court Justice James Catterson joined Kaye Scholer LLP's complex commercial litigation department in New York as special counsel. Catterson served for nine years as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Appellate Division, First Department.
Latham & Watkins LLP hired four intellectual property litigators as partners. Douglas E. Lumish, Jeffrey Homrig and Gabriel S. Gross will practice from the Silicon Valley office, while Michael E. Eisenberg will be based in New York. They were partners at Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman.
Peter Spanos joined Barnes & Thornburg LLP's Atlanta office as a partner in the labor and employment law department. Spanos was a partner at Burr & Forman LLP, working in the labor and employment and noncompete and trade secrets practices.
Jones Day added Lodewijk Berger to the firm's Amsterdam office as a partner in the tax practice. He arrives from Loyens & Loeff. Berger works with multinational corporations, banks and private equity funds.
The Securities and Exchange Commission's Carlo V. di Florio will head to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. He led the SEC's national exam program for more than three years. He will leave next month to lead a new division of risk and strategy at FINRA. Before joining the SEC in 2010, di Florio was a partner in the financial services risk and regulatory practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in New York, where he was a national leader in corporate governance, enterprise risk management, compliance and ethics.
Management consulting firm A.T. Kearney said Robert Haas will lead its private equity practice in the Americas, based in New York. He joined the firm in 1996 and was elected to partner in 2003. Haas also leads the mergers and acquisitions practice in the Americas.
Palmer Square Capital Management LLC took on Jeffrey D. Fox, formerly of Sandler O'Neill, SocGen, JPMorgan and Bear Stearns, as an executive director.
