Houlihan Lokey: Strategic Hiring

The leadership read

The hire commits Houlihan Lokey to a more deliberate infrastructure-and-real-assets lane within GP-led secondaries advisory — a corridor it previously served but not with dedicated senior origination capacity of this profile. Buffery's background spans both the buy side (HarbourVest, OPTrust) and investment committee-level decision-making, which means Houlihan Lokey is positioning to advise on transactions where counterpart sophistication is high and deal structuring around continuation vehicles, infrastructure income, and LP optionality is technically demanding. That is a different capability posture than generalist secondaries advisory. The related signals available here are thin on direct comparables — the 12 signals in the set are broadly labelled strategic_hiring but span music management, nonprofit philanthropy, and luxury e-commerce, with only BTG Consulting's lateral-partner moves from Kroll offering any structural parallel. Setting that noise aside, the honest read on the primary signal is that it sits inside a well-documented pattern in private capital advisory: GP-led secondary volume has drawn sustained lateral hiring across advisory platforms as the transaction type matures from niche to institutional-grade product, with Lazard, Jefferies, and Evercore all having expanded secondary advisory benches in prior periods. Across advisory firms building out in this corridor, the functional demand concentrates in two areas: transaction structuring leadership with cross-asset fluency (real assets, infrastructure, and private equity simultaneously), and investor-relations-adjacent commercial capability able to manage LP communication through continuation-fund processes. The market is moving toward operators who can hold both the structuring and the sponsor-client relationship without a handoff layer between them.