Merger Specialist Lesser Is a Partner at Irell & Manella

Attorney Henry Lesser, a mergers and acquisitions specialist, has joined the Century City firm of Irell & Manella as a partner.

The addition of Lesser to the firm is somewhat of an anomaly in today’s harsher legal climate. Bankruptcies and environmental law have replaced merger and acquisition work as the hot legal specialties; even law firms that cut staff overall have been beefing up those areas.

“Clearly, the merger mania of the ‘80s that made a lot of people rich and famous has waned,” Lesser said. “But I was doing M&A; work in the 1970s before the mania struck, and I intend to do it for a long time to come.”

Edmund M. Kaufman, co-chairman of Irell & Manella’s executive committee and himself active in the merger boom of the 1980s, agrees with Lesser that there will always be a need for merger-law specialists. “We don’t know when it will happen again, but there will be another boom,” Kaufman said.

Lesser, 44, joins Irell & Manella from the Los Angeles office of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, where he was a partner. Previously, he was a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York.

Wachtell Lipton and New York-based Fried Frank continue to take major roles in large mergers and acquisitions.