Addleshaws strengthens litigation with first partner hire in two years

Clarissa Coleman will join Addleshaw’s London office as a partner on 28 November. She joins from Consensus, which advises property entrepreneur Vincent Tchenguiz and the Tchenguiz Family Trust.

Coleman was the company’s most senior litigator, covering corporate, commercial, finance and property litigation. Before joining Consensus in 2009, she spent nine years as a solicitor at Clifford Chance.

“We’ve been looking to grow our practice for some time,” said Addleshaw’s head of litigation Richard Leedham. “We’ve been kept busy with the Abramovich and Ablyazov cases, but as you grow you need more partners. We made up two partners this year and two partners the year before, so we’ve been growing internally, but we also need to bring people in from outside.

Leedham added that Coleman would be an important strategic addition to the team.

“The single most active type of client currently litigating are high net-worth individuals with disputes often involving multi-jurisdictional fraud and trusts claims for large sums of money,” Leedham said.

He added that Addleshaws was still looking to grow in fraud and regulatory and general commercial litigation, and also in finance litigation.

Coleman is the first partner hire into Addleshaw’s litigation group since 2009, when the firm made a double hire from Winston & Strawn (19 August 2009 http://www.thelawyer.com/addleshaws-bolsters-litigation-with-double-winston-and-strawn-hire/1001720.article). One of the partners who joined from Winston, Kent Phillips, later defected to Berwin Leighton Paisner in September after being marked out to launch Addleshaws’ Singapore office (27 September 2011 http://www.thelawyer.com/addleshaws-singapore-plans-stall-as-launch-partner-defects-to-blp/1009567.article).

Addleshaws’ UK-wide litigation practice has around 30 partners and 114 fee earners. In London the firm has 16 partners, including Coleman, and roughly 55 fee-earners.