An Iranian lawyer was today awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, beating competition from a record 165 nominees. Shirin Ebadi is a lawyer, writer and human rights campaigner, and was the country’s first female judge before being forced to resign following the Islamic Revolution of 1979. On announcing the winner, the five-member Nobel selection committee said: […]
Clifford Chance and West Coast partner Tower Snow are being sued by legions of former Brobeck Phleger & Harrison partners and staff in an extraordinary suit seeking $100m in damages. Snow, the former chairman at Brobeck, which this year buckled under million of dollars of debt, is, along with CC, facing a litany of claims. […]
Simmons & Simmons has hired well-known media specialist Wolfgang Hess from Clifford Chance Pünder. A corporate partner, Hess led the media team at Clifford Chance’s Frankfurt office. Clients he regularly advises include Apax Partners, Bayerische Landesbank, Capital Radio and KarstadtQuelle as well as national and international companies with media-sector interests, institutional and private equity investors […]
Eversheds is continuing its heavy investment programme in Paris, with the hire of a corporate partner from Herbert Smith. Sylvie Dariosecq has been a partner at Herbert Smith’s Paris office for five years. She will share responsibility for the development of Eversheds’ corporate department in Paris with Pascal de Moidrey, who joined on 1 September […]
Slaughter and May is celebrating its client Spirit’s successful £2.51bn acquisition of Scottish & Newcastle’s pub estate. Slaughters partner Kathryn Davis led the team advising the Spirit consortium, with corporate partner Hywel Davies and debt finance partner Mark Hutchinson assisting. The firm won the instruction following its work on Spirit’s demerger from Punch Taverns, which […]
Simmons & Simmons has raided the Hong Kong office of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer for M&A lawyer Wui Seung Chong. Seung has become a consultant in Simmons’ Hong Kong office. He has particular experience in the financial sector, including a spell in the equity capital markets group at ABN Amro Rothschild. Seung was based in Beijing […]
Manchester personal injury firm Donns Solicitors has lost managing partner Hilary Meredith. Meredith, who made her name in Gulf War Syndrome litigation, has left the firm to return to fee-earning, establishing her own practice, Hilary Meredith Solicitors. She takes her clients and one qualified lawyer with her, but will not recruit any further staff from […]
The annual changing of the guard at the Bar Council has seen Doughty Street silk and current vice chairman Stephen Irwin QC elected unopposed to the post of chairman for 2004. He replaces incumbent chairman Matthias Kelly QC. Professional negligence and personal injury specialist Guy Mansfield QC will take on the vice chairman role, while […]
Irish corporate firm Arthur Cox has appointed Padraig O’Riordain as its new managing partner, succeeding Eugene McCague. A corporate finance specialist, he headed the firm’s New York office for three years before returning to Dublin in 1996. O’Riordain is set to take up his new post on 1 November and will practise out of the […]
Good for Eversheds. Undeterred by the realpolitik of international expansion, the firm is in the thick of negotiations with a string of firms from collapsed network Denton International. It’s not just Western Europe, by the way. Eversheds’ international head Alan Jenkins is on the brink of taking the firm into an association (as a prelude […]
Thousands of patients on waiting lists could receive surgery in hospitals on the Continent and be paid for by the NHS in cases where there was “undue delay”, following a ruling by the High Court last week. The case concerned Yvonne Watts, 72, an arthritis sufferer from Bedford, who claimed that the NHS should pay […]
Pensioners lost the right to claim compensation for unfair dismissal or redundancy last week, when the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) rejected a test case. The legal action concerned two workers in the clothing industry – John Rutherford, now 72, who was taken on at the age of 63 and made redundant when he was 67, […]