The competitive poaching efforts of PwC have been well documented in these pages, primarily because the communications is really good at issuing press releases announcing the talent they've scooped up. Other accounting firms of notable size have not embraced the power of the poaching press release…until Wednesday when Ernst & Young announced that they had a grip of new blood joining their west coast asset management tax practice.
Michael Doolan, Mark Gutierrez, Paul Kangail and Eric Wauthy all joined E&Y in California. They join from Macquarie Bank, Deloitte Tax, Rothstein Kass, and Deloitte Tax respectively. Gutierrez, Kangail, and Wauthy join as partners while Doolan will serve as a principal.
If that wasn't enough, yesterday E&Y issued two more press releases announcing the addition of two officials from the Treasury Department and seven – SEVEN! – new rainmakers in their M&A and Capital & Debt Advisory Business. This includes the new CEO of E&Y Capital Advisors, James Carter, who was previously a Managing Director at Macquarie. The rest of the group consists of two MDs from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and one each from RBS, RBC, Stephens, Inc., and SCP Worldwide.
So while Weinberger & Co. don't seem to be following the PwC model of developing a single farm system, it seems they have embraced the idea of pulling out the megaphone to welcome their new superstars.