Sanjeev Sharma > Shoosmiths LLP > Milton Keynes, England > Lawyer Profile

Shoosmiths LLP maintains its status as a market-leader on both the commercial and corporate fronts, acting on behalf of a blue-chip client list that includes both major domestic and transnational corporations. On the commercial side, tech and privacy expert Nick Holland leads the Thames Valley team which has significant cross-sector expertise, including in the automotive, retail, healthcare and life science spaces. Fellow commercial partner Fiona Teague is the key contact and handles the team’s impressive portfolio of large scale cross-border transactions, with particular expertise in those involving logistics and warehousing, supply chain, retail, food and beverage, and FMCG. The corporate side of the practice is led by Sanjeev Sharma and sees complex corporate, private equity, venture capital and M&A work. As head of the Thames Valley office, co-corporate lead Nina Smith focuses on building the team’s strong client base. Her practice emphasises sell side mandates, buy and build acquisitions and advising private equity houses on their investment portfolios. At associate level, Daniela Munro‘s experience includes M&A, corporate restructurings and IPOs.

Led from Birmingham by the ‘excellent’ Alastair Peet but operating very much as a unified national practice with other key resources in Reading and London, Shoosmiths LLP provides ‘sensible, actionable and practical advice’ to an increasingly balanced mix of investors and investees. Peet remains a popular choice among prominent fund clients, including Octopus Ventures, which benefit from his ‘very collaborative and consensual approach’ to transactional work as well as his intimate knowledge of the underlying documentation, having himself played a key role drafting and updating the model documents for the BVCA. Along with the ‘knowledgeable and commercial’ Alastair Hammerton, who heads the Midlands corporate team, Peet has also been at the forefront of utilising document automation, AI review, and data analytics to deliver efficiencies and insights for clients. In London, the ‘very knowledgeable’ Steve Barnett is ‘well connected in the venture capital market in Europe’, providing ‘very practical’ advice to his core company side roster, as well as a growing number of institutional investors on early stage funding. Other key members of the national team include Thames Valley-based corporate partner Sanjeev Sharma, whose work encompasses a significant amount of venture capital mandates; Reading-based tax partner Tom Wilde, who is a key resource on the crucial tax aspects associated with the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and Venture Capital Trusts (VCT); and the ‘excellent’ Helen Burnell, who leads the firm’s spHERe initiative to support female founders and venture capitalists. All named practitioners are based in Birmingham, unless otherwise noted.

With a ‘very experienced team with good depth‘, clients praise Shoosmiths LLP for its broad capabilities in mid-market transactions, where the team acts for a host of PE firms and portfolio companies. The group’s regular workload includes a number of multimillion-pound acquisitions and disposals, as well as investment deals and reorganisations. The team is jointly headed up by Amit Nayyar, a ‘commercial and pragmatic’ figure who divides his time between London and Milton Keynes, and national PE head Sean Wright, who works between the firm’s offices in London and Solent. Other key figures include Sanjeev Sharma, who also heads up the firm’s Corporate South team, and Kiran Dhesi, who leads the London-based private equity offering, working closely with a number of the firm’s leading sponsor clients.