The Legal 500

Thrings, the recently rebranded Thring Townsend Lee & Pembertons, is now a firm of 55 partners with a total staff of 350 across London, Bristol, Bath and Swindon. It has consolidated a series of mergers across the M4 corridor, providing a platform to build on the commercial focus of the firm, integrating it with its renowned private client expertise, to offer the complete service for businesses and their owners.

The firm: As experts in key industry sectors including agriculture, energy and waste, defence and aerospace, retail, and media and marketing, the firm is known for understanding clients’ commercial challenges and personal objectives, for building close client relationships and providing specialist and focused legal advice.

Types of work undertaken: The agriculture team has provided specialist advice to those involved in farming and rural affairs for over a century. It has a long history of acting for the owners of significant landed estates, farmers, agri-businesses and other rural enterprises and has close relationships with numerous industry bodies such as the NFU, the NFU Mutual and the country land business association. The spectrum of advice given ranges from sophisticated tax, succession planning and other heritage issues to rights of way legislation, buying and selling farms, coastal access, diversification, environmental law, regulations, disputes and issues around food and farming businesses.

Commercial/corporate: advisory work for businesses is at the heart of the firm, combining commercial and contracts advice with specialist areas such as intellectual property and construction. The firm has an established reputation in key sectors including defence, creative media, and energy and waste. Key regional players such as Future Publishing, Teleperformance, MAN Truck, and Bus and Honda Europe have chosen the firm’s experienced and value for money commercial advisors.

The commercial property team enjoyed significant new client wins in 2010 and continues advising on significant regeneration projects, high-value corporate real estate transactions and major redevelopment schemes as well as acting for established plc landlords on their real estate portfolio management and a significant number of institutional lenders on their secured lending requirements. The team continues to retain important existing clients such as Stadium Investments (on the continued regeneration of land surrounding the new Emirates Stadium in Highbury) and Cyclamax (a significant client in the waste to energy sector.)

The construction team has also been in high demand, advising two major water utilities as well as energy and information and communications technology clients, and construction and procurement work on an Olympics-based project.

For the employment team, a great deal of advisory work this year has revolved around strategies for keeping corporate and SME clients in good shape post-recession. Landed estates and agriculture clients continue to provide a niche and specialist area of practice, working with colleagues from the firm’s leading agriculture team. The team increasingly advises media and technology clients, and continues to act for a number of significant manufacturing clients, particularly in the pharmaceutical sector.

The litigation team continues to focus on IP, financial services regulation, pensions and professional negligence disputes, as well as defamation claims, fraud and asset tracing, tax and judicial review.

The nationally-renowned personal injury team specialises in two areas: catastrophic brain/spinal injuries and life-threatening industrial disease claims, particularly those arising from asbestos. The team handles high-value, low-volume work and has secured over £25m worth of compensation for clients in the last 12 months alone.

Thrings’ clients reap the benefits of a truly cross-office private client team, assisting clients in every aspect of the management of their assets from one generation to the next. This team combines a unique range of skills from the cutting-edge tax driven practice, the agricultural and landed estate specialists, and the firm’s own trust company

The family team regularly handles cases involving multi-million pound assets including those tied up in hedge funds and those sited in several jurisdictions and owned by companies registered abroad. Work includes financial dispute resolution, divorce, separation, pre- and post-nuptials.

Number of UK partners 55
Number of other UK fee-earners 123