... as Jordan switches back to litigation to confront rising workload

Clifford Chance partner Nicholas Jordan is rejoining the firm's litigation department after working in its commercial practice for 10 years.

Jordan says the volume of high quality tax litigation work he has been doing has risen so much in recent years that he feels a departmental move is justified.

He says: "If I am doing more of this type of work it is not ideal to do it from the corporate side."

He explains that there are two reasons why his workload in tax litigation has increased significantly.

"First, it is difficult in developed countries to raise headline tax so tax revenue needs to be increased by other means," he says.

He argues that this makes fiscal clients, such as the Inland Revenue and Customs & Excise, more litigious. "We are now more aggressive about getting taxes, making sure there is no avoidance," says Jordan.

He says the second reason is that over the past 10 years the fiscal authorities have increasingly targeted people who are avoiding paying large amounts of tax rather than taxpayers in the lower brackets.