Gateley Legal

Andrew Johnson

Andrew has many years’ experience in handling commercial disputes and heads up Gateley’s Commercial Dispute Resolution unit. His expertise encompasses court proceedings, arbitrations, mediations and expert determinations. Andrew has significant experience in acting in a range of disputes including dealing with issues arising out of corporate transactions, complex projects, trading contracts and property related agreements. Andrew has acted for a range of Plc clients and other organisations including: Bellway Homes Limited, Repsol Sinopec Resources UK Limited, Marshalls Plc, FCC Environment Limited and the Universities of Leicester and Leeds.

Becky Shepherd

Becky is a specialist residential development lawyer who acts primarily for national housebuilders. She is part of the site set-up limb of our residential development unit and now specialises in the set-up of new build estates and the preparation of sales documentation for a variety of clients. She also deals with management agreements with management companies together with legal issues arising throughout the life of the developments.  Becky has previous experience in our land acquisitions team dealing with strategic and immediate land acquisitions, via conditional contracts and option agreements, as well as disposals of affordable housing to registered providers, both turnkey and golden brick.

David Armitage

David has a wealth of expertise in corporate finance, corporate and commercial matters, including: mergers & acquisitions, cross-border transactions and investments. UK inward- and outward-bound investments acquisitions, corporate structuring and projects. He has over 30 years’ experience working for clients on growth and acquisition strategies. His clients include public companies, multi-national and private family-owned companies from the UK, the US and further afield and covering many different sectors.

Gavin Winter

Gavin is a specialist commercial litigator with many years of experience handling disputes of all varieties and sizes, including high value and complex claims. He has a wide and varied experience of managing commercial and contractual disputes, negligence actions (including professional negligence matters), and property litigation.

George Parker-Fuller

George specialises in advising national and regional housebuilders from the point at which a new site is first identified, through negotiating heads of terms, assisting in guiding the structure of the transaction and preparing and negotiating the site acquisition documentation. With substantial experience in relation to mixed use development, he is able to give holistic advice to his clients where they are taking a residential phase of a mixed use scheme or selling any commercial elements of large scale residential led schemes. 

Joanne Sears

Joanne is a specialist commercial real estate lawyer with a broad range of experience.  Since joining Gateley, she has specialised in advising national housebuilders on all aspects of land acquisition of greenfield and brownfield sites, from initial title advice to the acquisition of land, strategic options, multi-developer collaborations and land promotions. Her focus has been land in Yorkshire and the North East. Joanne has acted for numerous FTSE-listed companies on a variety of real estate matters during the course of her career, including commercial landlord and tenant matters, strategic land acquisitions and site assembly as well as corporate support due diligence and property portfolio management.

Kerry Gibbons

Kerry is a seasoned and highly regarded banking lawyer with a wealth of experience. Kerry is known for her balance of fastidious attention to detail and solutions focused commerciality. She is determined and will always go the extra mile to get transactions across the line. Kerry is great at forging strong relationships with both clients and other lawyers. She has a broad practice acting for both banks and borrowers across a range of transactions. She is experienced in acquisition finance, real estate finance, structured finance, asset-based lending and traditional banking finance.

Matt Leech

Matt specialises in all aspects of recovery, restructuring and insolvency work, with an emphasis on non-contentious corporate and property advice. He advises insolvency practitioners, fixed charge receivers, banks and other lenders, directors and shareholders. Matt has undertaken secondments with Royal Bank of Scotland’s AIM team, Yorkshire Bank’s SBS team and National Australia Bank’s CRE team and has a good working knowledge of lenders’ internal processes, procedures and requirements.

Matthew Brown

Matthew is an experienced restructuring advisor to large and small companies. He also advises restructuring professionals such as accountants, financial institutions, directors, landlords and pensions trustees. Matthew has particular expertise in creating and implementing solutions to restructure financially or operationally challenged companies.

Nicholas Ferrar

Patent Attorney, Director

Paul Ball

Paul advises clients on employment matters across a variety of sectors in relation to: day-to-day employee issues such as disciplinary action and dealing with grievances strategic advice, in particular relating to change management: large scale redundancy, changing terms and conditions of employment or business transfer situations discrimination issues confidentiality and post-termination restrictive covenant issues contractual issues in relation to business transfers and TUPE employment aspects of corporate transactions employment law training service agreements settlement agreements, in particular executive severance Paul has advised employers on all aspects of employment law for over 20 years and has particular experience in relation to discrimination issues, contractual issues arising on business transfers, and the delivery of in-house client training.

Pauline Munro

Pauline is a seasoned and highly regarded regulatory lawyer with vast experience of working for clients facing regulatory intervention. She specialises in health & safety including fatal accidents, trading law & trading standards, food safety, product safety & product recall and contentious environmental matters.

Philip Gregory

Phil specialises in commercial property development work, acting for developers and end user occupiers on complex and large scale development schemes. He has particular expertise in acting on retail development projects and regeneration schemes. In addition to advising on development transactions, Phil has experience in acting on significant investment and portfolio sale and purchase transactions as well as all types of landlord and tenant matters.

Richard Morton

Richard is highly regarded for his innovation, broad experience and thought leadership in all types of financing transactions.  He works on highly complex, demanding and innovative deals and is renowned for providing the highest quality legal advice for more than 20 years to governments, banks, funds, UK and international institutions and corporates.  Richard is author and contributing editor to the leading textbook Modern Financial Regulation.

Richard Gillatt

Richard specialises in the site set up and preparation of sales documentation in relation to residential developments including management agreements with management companies. He also deals with legal issues arising throughout the life of the developments and the handover to management companies. He has over 30 years of experience acting for local and national housebuilders. He has dealt with most aspects of property work for housebuilders over the years.

Rob Payne

Rob’s practice focuses on advising financial institutions on a variety of contentious issues including: managed exit advice; asset-tracing and recovery; operational disputes and claims arising from sale of bank products; enforcement of secured lending (including challenges to security documents, occupancy and lease issues and disputes involving subrogation, misrepresentation, duress and undue influence); risk assessment and dispute prevention advice (for instance arising from changes to lending criteria or business practices); professional indemnity claims; reputational issues; and injunctions and disclosure orders.Rob has practiced exclusively in the financial disputes field for almost two decades, working with most major financial institutions and lenders. He regularly leads client relationships. Rob also has higher rights of audience as a Solicitor Advocate.

Rob Lucas

Rob specialises in intellectual property law. He provides advice across the full range of IP rights, whether in relation to their identification, protection or enforcement. Rob also assists businesses develop overseas markets for their products and services, managing international brands and working with tried and trusted associates to enforce rights and resolve disputes around the world. Rob is well known for supporting manufacturing, packaging, cosmetic and retail businesses. He advises cosmetic manufacturers and suppliers in respect of their activities in the UK and around the world and is active within Yorkshire’s Cosmetics Cluster. This work includes licensing rights from household name celebrities and sports stars and advising on licensing deals with well-known brands.

Roger McCourt

Roger has acted for corporate clients and financial institutions for over two decades, dealing with all aspects of recoveries, litigation, dispute resolution and risk management issues. This includes complex recoveries work, contractual disputes, insolvency issues, operational disputes, claims involving allegations of misselling/mispresentation, professional negligence and fraud. During his career, Roger has had two secondments to the in house legal teams of major clearing banks and is recognised as having a wealth of insight and understanding of the financial services sector, as well the internal pressures and external requirements of clients across commercial sectors.

Tamanna Keir

Tamanna advises on all aspects of corporate law, specifically company mergers and acquisitions, private equity investment and capital markets.  She acts for companies, nominated advisors, private equity investors and management teams and has significant cross-border experience with clients based in the US, East Asia, India and Europe.

William Ballmann

William has over 30 years experience of business restructurings, re-financings, rescues and turnaround. He specialises in advising the management of public and private companies where there is some form of financial or organisational under-performance, stress or difficulty. Over the years, William has acted on numerous high-profile restructurings and insolvencies such as the ground breaking Parkside Industries Group, CardWorld, Furness Withy Shipping, Morris Properties, Fox Hayes Solicitors, Barretts & Stylo Shoes, Powerfuel Mining, Bid TV, Jones the Bootmaker and he advises various tax offices in Germany in connection with ‘insolvency tourism’ cases.