Trowers & Hamlins’ head of Birmingham real estate Amanda Hanmore spent much of 2018 working on local regeneration projects around the country, while growing the burgeoning real estate practice in the firm’s Midlands office. When Hanmore arrived to lead the practice three years ago, Trowers’ Birmingham office only had one managing associate and a couple […]
Amy Kennedy was welcomed into the partnership at Gibson Dunn at the beginning of 2018 and has pulled off a range of complex finance deals since. The month she qualified, Lehman Brothers collapsed, causing the kind of turbulence the financial world had not seen in decades. Working in finance in trying times has meant Kennedy’s […]
Charles Russell Speechlys‘ Malcolm MacDougall is a whirling dervish of a dealmaker, making his name as one of the most active M&A lawyers in the City. Since MacDougall became co-head of corporate last year, PEP within the department has shot up 40 per cent and he has seen through a bounty of mid-market deals. These […]
Under Tom Mercer’s leadership, Ashurst’s London corporate practice has been a sizzling hotbed of big deals. In 2018, he secured a run of three deals for resources powerhouse Vedanta, including its $813m (£642m) acquisition of Electrosteel Steels under India’s new Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. This culminated in Mercer advising the company’s chairman, Indian billionaire businessman […]
After spending the majority of his career in-house, including a stint as general counsel of Umbro, Richard Millington returned to the world of private practice in 2016, tasked with kickstarting a sports team at Shoosmiths. It was a bold decision – as Millington himself told the firm, he was an expensive hire with no business […]
As one of the youngest-ever female transactional partners in Kirkland’s London office, Kirsteen Nicol has been making a name for herself in the private equity space. She was made up three years ago and has been described as the ‘all-round package’ for her work ethic, front-of-house and stellar relationships with clients. Nicol has been looking […]
Last year, DLA Piper’s Richard Obank was the firm’s only UK restructuring partner not parachuted in to support on Carillion’s liquidation. The reason? Obank was already at the beck and call of a number of retailers feeling the pressure on the high street, an area in which City lawyers were rubbing their hands with glee […]
While CMS partner Selina Potter has been one of the leading lawyers in the UK media sector for more than two decades, it was her regulatory work on Comcast’s acquisition of Sky that made 2018 a landmark year. The acquisition was one of the defining media deals of the decade and marks the continued trend […]
If there is one man that can rally the masses around renewable energy, it’s Chris Pritchett, head of energy at Foot Anstey. An expert in renewable technology law, he has been helping engineer a sound framework for the future of energy, launching initiatives shaping the entire sector. Batteries are the next big thing, and one […]
When IP specialist Alexandra Pygall arrived at Stephenson Harwood as a partner in 2012, having been an associate in Covington & Burling’s life sciences team, she had to build her practice from a standing start. Several years on, Stephenson Harwood’s trust in her has reaped rewards. The firm’s life sciences group has quadrupled in size […]
Caroline Rae has only been a partner at Herbert Smith Freehills for three years, but she has added considerable weight to the firm’s standing in public company transactions. The most significant transaction that kept Rae on her toes at the beginning of 2018 was the £3.4bn proposed takeover of British shopping centre operator Intu Properties […]
Advising on a massive real estate transaction during the largest-ever merger in the UK legal sector is not an easy task. But CMS real estate partner Clare Thomas managed it masterfully when she completed Credit Suisse’s long-in-the-making £410m acquisition of 20 Canada Square, a 12-storey landmark building in Canary Wharf. The job challenged Thomas to […]