Doughty Street takes four Cloisters tenants

Doughty Street is the latest set to profit from the current upheaval at Cloisters, snatching four of its tenants.

As exclusively revealed in The Lawyer (12 June) Cloisters has undergone a massive restructuring process which has caused the set's civil and criminal practice groups to split.

The majority of the criminal group will leave in September.

This leaves Cloisters as a specialist civil set, which it believes will allow it to increase turnover by 50 per cent. It also hopes to recruit 15 new tenants.

But three of the four tenants moving to Doughty Street were originally cited as civil practitioners who would stay at the set. They are Henrietta Hill, Paul Bowen and Ulele Burnham.

Hill is a highly regarded employment and public law practitioner. She is regularly instructed by human rights group Liberty and helped compile the Citizens Guide to Human Rights. Bowen is a mental health specialist and Burnham an employment practitioner.

They will be followed to Doughty Street by junior Steven Powells, who has an impressive international cri-minal law track record.

A Cloisters spokesman says: "Cloisters fully respects the wishes of those mixed practitioners who would prefer not to be in a specialist civil set.

"Our decision to concentrate on the fields of employment, clinical negligence, public and media law inev-itably means that some of our more generalist practitioners would feel better placed elsewhere."

Doughty Street has also recruited Siza Agha from 10 King's Bench Walk and part-time human rights lecturer Francis Fitzgibbon from 33 Bedford Row.

Despite the recent loss of Nadine Finch and Jonah Walker-Smith, the new recruits take the number of tenants at the leading civil liberties set to 63.