Claire Bunbury

laire Bunbury specialises in insolvency, contract, company law, property and professional negligence. She is recommended as a Band One insolvency and restructuring practitioner in Chambers and Partners and is ranked as a leading company and insolvency junior in Legal 500.

Claire has an extensive and varied insolvency practice. Recent experience includes:

Advising and successfully appearing on behalf of company directors seeking to rectify the position where there had been an invalid out of court appointment of administrators as a consequence of the directors’ failure to obtain the prior consent of the Financial Conduct Authority;

Advising in a case in which hundreds of companies had potentially been placed into members’ voluntary liquidations invalidly as a consequence of a failure to adhere to the relevant voting procedures;

Advising and acting in applications brought by creditors seeking to end the process of administration where improper motive was alleged;

Appearing for a company seeking an injunction restraining presentation of a winding up petition in circumstances where the underlying debt (a sum due to HMRC in excess of £1.5m) was not disputed and where there was no cross-claim, successfully obtaining a time limited injunction in order to enable the company to complete a restructure for the purpose of releasing funds; and

Advising and acting in complex cases involving preferences, transactions at an undervalue, void dispositions, transactions defrauding creditors, misfeasance, trusts, disqualification of directors, Berkeley Applegate relief, search and seizure, challenges to the conduct of office holders, remuneration disputes, application of the set-off provisions, tax avoidance schemes, applications to sell charged property as though it were not subject to security, fraud and petitions for winding-up on the just and equitable ground.

As part of her wider litigation practice, Claire is frequently retained in connection with company law disputes, including unfair prejudice petitions and derivative actions. She has extensive trial experience in the commercial litigation sphere and is known for her strong cross examination skills. Claire has dealt with cases involving allegations of unlawfulness in connection with fee-sharing arrangements between claims management companies and firms of solicitors, in one of which she successfully acted on behalf of the claims management company claimant in obtaining an order for payment of the fees that had been alleged to have been unlawful and irrecoverable. She has recently been retained in cases concerning fraudulent misrepresentation, economic duress, proprietary estoppel and unjust enrichment, and in 2024 advised and appeared in a successful application for a guardianship order pursuant to the Guardianship (Missing Persons) Act 2017 (such orders being very rare).

Claire studied Jurisprudence at Wadham College, Oxford, before going on to complete the BCL there the following year.

Claire is ranked as a leading individual within her practice areas in both the Legal 500 and Chambers and Partners.