Chambers Review
Provided by Chambers
Dispute Resolution: Commercial Chancery - UK
What the Team is Known For
4 Stone Buildings is an impressive chancery set, housing a strong bench of barristers at both senior and junior level who are well versed in high-profile and complex disputes. The team's expertise spans a wide range of areas, and its members routinely undertake cases involving financial services and banking, commercial contracts and insolvency law. Shareholder disputes are also a key area of strength for the team, drawing on the set's established expertise in company law. The set's barristers are regularly instructed in litigation arising in the oil and gas sector, and have experience of acting in both domestic and international matters. As testament to their skills, they have recently been involved in some major matters, including: Autonomy Corporation v Dr Michael Lynch; the “tuna bonds” litigation; and Barclays Bank Plc v Dylan & Ors and Barclays Bank Plc v Fresh Thinking Group & Ors, a series of related proceedings seeking the recovery from seven individual and corporate defendants of £14 million extracted from various company accounts at the bank.
David Goddard is the senior clerk.
Strengths
Their clerking is superb – top dollar. The clerks are very flexible and good at empathising and understanding the pressures on us.
The clerks are helpful and proactive.
The clerks are really, really helpful. They are good humoured, always responsive and there when needed to scope out the availability of counsel.
Notable practitioners
He is very, very good – he's sharp, quick and extremely thorough.
He is amazing. A true star amongst the silks.
Jonathan is highly elegant and persuasive in his delivery. He has a scalpel-like intelligence and is a creative thinker.
Impressive in every regard. His input throughout a case is invaluable.
Excellent at handling complex and novel disputes.
Gregory is an excellent team player. Clients like and respect his approach. He is thorough and will make himself available as and when required.
Gregory is a brilliant all-rounder, who is a joy to work with.
Richard is an excellent advocate. He is very good at strategy and picking the best points to argue.
Sharif is fantastic. He is super-analytical and excellent on his feet.
Sharif's advocacy is fantastic. He is very incisive as a cross-examiner and is really skilful and great at building rapport with judges and tribunals.
Sharif is passionate, hard-working and all over the detail.
Tom's key strengths are his mastery of the detail in a case and his superior drafting.
Just fantastic. His advocacy is crisp, he is authoritative in any setting and his advice is always considered.
A go-to for shareholder disputes. Unflappable and commercial, he's good at giving a good steer to those that instruct him, right from the outset of the case.
James is very calm and assured, and just great to work with.
Put simply, James provides a KC level of service and expertise. He is very bright, reassuringly calm and possessed of excellent judgement. He is great on his feet and a real pleasure to work with.
John is a great, ballsy advocate. Nothing scares him. He is really into the detail, and gives you something more than the average barrister as he thinks of points no-one else has.
He is fantastic at cross-examining. His ability to put people in a difficult position and get the right answers out of them is just amazing.
Alastair has an amazing brain but is very humble with it. He gets into the detail of a case and ticks every box in terms of what the instructing solicitor wants.
He is technically, extremely good, holds his own with senior barristers and is a silk in waiting.
He provides top-quality service and has compendious legal knowledge. He is a complete all rounder of the Bar.
He is very good. He has established himself as a solid operator for chancery commercial matters and, in particular, banking and finance-related matters.
One of the best of the younger generation of KCs.
A terrific lawyer who is hard-working and technically outstanding.
Incredibly bright and very commercial, he's a real pleasure to work with.
Donald is a silk in waiting. He is clever, proactive, great at advocacy and a real team player.
He is tremendously hard-working and happy to roll his sleeves up.
Alexander is bright, very hard-working, good fun and a man of sound judgement. He likes a laugh – it can be a very dull life, the law, and it's nice to have somebody around who livens things up.
Andrew is really fantastic in terms of driving detailed aspects of the case forward in a timely manner. He is just a delight to work with.
He is very bright and very hard-working, and writes excellently. He produces excellent skeleton arguments.
Eleanor produces very complicated documents in a short space of time, all of which are very logically presented. She is extremely bright, diplomatic when she needs to be and very easy to deal with.
Eleanor is a very strong junior barrister, who is bright and quick on her feet.
Her research is excellent, she's very diligent and she puts forward good skeleton arguments.
Emma is absolutely outstanding. She is probably the most impressive junior of her call that I have worked with. The thing that really stands out is the quality of her judgement.
A fluent and persuasive advocate, who is a very good cross-examiner.
Incredibly polite and user-friendly, he's a smart barrister who writes well.
Very considered in the way he works, Joseph is sensible and sensitive to difficult issues within cases. He's a boon to those that instruct him as he produces skeleton arguments quickly.
Lara is a very industrious junior, who is good with clients and great at handling huge pieces of litigation.
Nicola is incredibly hard-working and is able to get into the detail of a case quickly. She can digest complex and voluminous information speedily and effectively, and is an excellent advocate.
Nicola is a stand-out junior and a very safe pair of hands for any dispute, however complex.
Tiran is absolutely brilliant – the man you want on your side in any dispute.