Weil, Gotshal & Manges brought on its seventh lateral private funds partner in two years on Monday as part of a persistent growth effort for the practice. Private funds co-chair Andrew Chizzik said he expected that practice growth to continue, as the firm seeks to meet the greatest private fund demand in its history. David Greene joined Weil’s New York and Washington, D.C. offices on Monday after more than eight years at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Chizzik said that Weil’s private funds team as a whole, which a firm representative said includes around 90 attorneys in the U.S. and Europe, has seen the same increase in emerging manager work. Chizzik declined to speak to specific figures for the practice’s collections, but he said that in terms of demand, “2025 was the busiest year that the fund group has ever had.” Weil’s private funds group is “quite hopeful” that 2026 will outperform 2025, Chizzik said. He noted the firm’s recent success advising New York-based middle market private equity firm JLL Partners close a $1.4 billion fund as an example of the high-value client work that the private funds practice is engaged in on behalf of its clients. For his part, Greene said that he has seen a particularly large uptick in demand from fund managers leaving major financial firms and striking out on their own. “Recently, there’s a fair amount of interest from emerging managers looking to launch a private funds business and raise their first fund, which I think is a healthy sign for the market,” Greene said. “Personally, I see it as really gratifying to see a sponsor grow from an idea all the way to a first closing and beyond. So that’s an exciting thing to see and something I hope to continue to do more of as I work at Weil.” Greene said that he was motivated to move to Weil because he saw it as a space for growth in his own practice and because he could be a part of broader growth within the firm. Chizzik noted that in addition to the seven lateral private funds partners, including Greene, the firm has also promoted two private funds partners internally and will continue to seek new talent opportunistically. There is no particular number of attorneys that the firm is aiming for on the private funds team, Chizzik said, but he added that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if there were more lateral announcements on the team soon, given the high volume of client work to be done. “I think any way that you were to look at it, the growth over the last number of years has been exceptional, and we expect that growth to continue,” Chizzik said. “Whether you measure that by number of partners globally, number of partners in the U.S., geographies in which we have footprints, number of associates, frankly, just the total demand for our hours has grown dramatically over the last number of years and we expect that to continue.” In an email to Law.com, a representative for Simpson Thacher thanked Greene for his contributions to the firm and wished him well.