Head of Real Estate Finance to £850,000 UK Firm Back to List

The legal press regularly writes glowing articles about the latest challenger firms, often these articles are adversely prophetic! Fortunately, this well respected upper-mid market law firm has avoided such praise and has quietly got on with the business of law and making a profit. The firm has been under new leadership for a few years, and the matter-a-fact transparent approach of management has cascaded down to enthuse the partners to perform and hence benefit from consistent point value increases.

The firm has a leading real estate team and a leading real estate finance team, with a number of directories ranked lawyers in each. The real estate finance team has a strong lender side practice focusing increasingly on alternative finance and historically on banks, in fact the focus of the entire finance practice is moving more towards alternative sources of finance. The team is also steadily increasing the number of borrow-side and international investors clients.

The real estate finance lawyers sit in the Finance group but they are well integrated with the real estate team. The team has specialists covering a number of areas complementing the real estate team, other areas include PRS, hotels and student accommodation finance.

Currently the partner team has a well-structured pyramid hierarchy but there is a succession issue so there is a clear opportunity for a mid-level partner to take on the leadership of the team in the very short term. This will be an equity appointment and hence a following will be required.