Mayer Brown Adds M&A Partner From Baker Botts

Mayer Brown is seeking continued growth in Northern California, adding a partner from Baker Botts who focuses on M&A, emerging companies and venture capital.

Chicago-founded Mayer Brown on Tuesday said Samuel Dibble is joining its San Francisco office, with firm leaders there looking for continued growth across Northern California more broadly as well as in places it can “connect the dots,” such as Salt Lake City.

Dibble previously served as partner-in-charge for Baker Botts’ San Francisco office and its West Coast corporate department chair. He advises investment funds and private and public companies, describing it as a “full life-cycle practice on the company side,” adding that he also has a financial background and can help clients who need things like investment bank help, commercial lenders or accounting firms.

He also said a lot of his work ends up being M&A and joint venture-type work, including acquisitions of companies. He also tends to counsel clients in industries such as food and beverage, alternative energy, wine and tech, including emerging aspects of tech like blockchain and crypto.

He said, among other factors, that the firm’s addition late last year of a three-partner real estate and hospitality group from Goodwin Procter helped tip the scales on his decision to move. "Mayer Brown is being smart and aggressive about its growth in the Bay Area,” he said, noting that the addition of partners Dustin Calkins, Teresa Goebel and Benjamin Tschann in November “was really what probably pushed Mayer Brown over the line in my mind.”

Dibble said a lot of what he does is hotel, real estate and hospitality-related, and with the wine, food and beverage overlay on top, it was a highly complementary piece. “That’s a great example of a great group coming in together with a lot of synergistic overlays with what I do,” he said.

Bill Kucera, co-leader of the firm’s global M&A practice, said the firm is excited to add talent in NorCal. He said the region has always been a hotbed of legal work, both in technology, agriculture, and food and beverage, though historically, many firms have focused more on Palo Alto.

“It’s just really synergistic and makes sense to have strong offerings in each of Palo Alto and San Francisco for our combined Northern California practice,” he said, adding the firm four years ago opened in Salt Lake City, "which we’ve had a lot of strength and success in.”

He said that market remains a focus and that “connecting those dots” gives the firm “a way to win a lot of work.”

Dibble added that it’s not just in the U.S.—he said being in the food and agriculture industries, especially with disruptions to supply chains and changing tariffs, it helps to have colleagues in places such as South America, for instance.

He noted Mayer Brown has an office in Brazil, so instead of having to identify other firms and pass off work in that region from clients who represent growers or other producers in the region, “supply chain disruptions and vagaries of local economies and what the price tag ends up being under the changed regime is an area where having local expert advice is potentially helpful,” Dibble said.