In its aim to go head-to-head with Canada’s top-tier corporate law firms, Cozen O’Connor has snagged three more lawyers from the Vancouver office of Miller Thomson on top of five others who made the jump earlier this month.
Elizabeth Holden, Gosia Piasecka, and Nicholas Krishan will join their former colleagues, Rory Godinho, Kathy Tang, Lucy Schilling, Brian Fast and Iain Mingo, in the firm’s international capital markets and securities practice group. Holden joins as a partner, while Piasecka and Krishan will be associates.
Brigeeta Richdale, managing partner of Cozen O’Connor’s office in Vancouver, said the firm’s U.S-Canadian cross-border transactions are “growing by leaps and bounds,” allowing the firm to attract such “highly regarded” lawyers to its team.
Over the last 10 months, Cozen has bolstered its cross-border transactional and litigation team in Vancouver with 10 lawyers, including a former litigator with the provincial securities regulator and a trio from Cassels Brock & Blackwell, who joined last June. Commercial litigator Peter Henein, a fourth Cassels lawyer who moved to Cozen along with Richdale, Shane Hardy and Rebecca Sim, left this month to join Waddell Phillips, a small litigation boutique in Toronto.
Hardy, Cozen O’Connor’s Toronto office managing partner, said the fast growth of its capital markets team highlights “how we are aggressively moving forward with our strategic vision of building a full-service practice to compete directly with top-tier Canadian firms.”
Holden’s background includes guiding private and public enterprises in the natural resource, technology, and entertainment sectors through equity offerings, private placements, bought-deal financings, corporate financings, IPOs, and M&A transactions. Her former clients include Canaccord Genuity Corp., Midas Gold Corp., and Alexco Resource Corp., according to an archived version of her old firm bio.
She said she is excited to join “a cutting-edge firm with an international footprint.”
Fluent in English, German, and Polish, Piasecka provides public and private companies with strategic counsel on M&A, debt and equity offerings, regulatory compliance, startup matters, and corporate governance.
Krishan focuses his practice on regulatory compliance, securities transactions, commercial lending arrangements, and corporate governance for businesses in Canada’s cannabis, construction, infrastructure, energy, and natural resources sectors.
Miller Thomson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the group’s departure.
Cozen has 750 lawyers in 31 locations, including 22 in three Canadian offices.
