Herbies partner fast-tracked to management

Herbert Smith has moved to fill the gap left by Dundas & Wilson’s raid on the firm for property litigation head Martin Thomas, promoting an internal candidate who has been partner for less than 12 months.

Matthew Bonye, who qualified as a solicitor-advocate in 1998 and was promoted to the partnership last April, is to take over as property litigation head when Thomas moves to Dundas in April.

Thomas’ move, first revealed on TheLawyer.com (10 Jan 2007), takes the Scottish-based Dudas’s London fee-earning workforce to above 90.

Bonye specialises in large-scale disputes, including compulsory purchase order (CPO) disputes. He represented Stagecoach as an objector to the Olympic CPO inquiry last year.

Herbert Smith’s head of real estate Iain Rothnie said in a statement: “The property litigation team is a key element of [the real estate department] and Matthew, having been at the firm since he was a trainee and as one of our strong coterie of solicitor-advocates, is ideally placed to continue development of that practice.”