Rob Thompson To Succeed Jon Vivian On 1st May

National law firm Irwin Mitchell announces that as of 1st May 2014, real estate partner Rob Thompson will take over as Head of the London Real Estate team at Irwin Mitchell from current head, Jon Vivian.  Jon Vivian will continue as a senior real estate partner in London and will concentrate on his role as relationship partner for a number of key strategic clients and will target new client opportunities for the firm.
 
Rob Thompson was one of the four partners in the 20 strong real estate team that came over with Jon Vivian from SJ Berwin in November 2010 to found Irwin Mitchell's London real estate practice and he has increasingly taken a leadership role in the department. The team is well known in the market and acts for a wide variety of banks, funds and leading property companies. The team brought a number of significant clients to Irwin Mitchell, including Prestbury, Max Property Group, Gazeley, British Land, Redevco, Raven Russia and Honda. This list has been supplemented with several new clients including Ellandi Retail Fund, Caudwell Properties, HSS Hire Service Group, Mercer Real Estate Partners, Lone Star, Tishman Speyer and Wells Fargo. The London team now consists of 10 partners and an additional 15 fee earning staff. It is one of the jewels in Irwin Mitchell's national real estate practice which has offices in Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham, in addition to London and numbers over 72 lawyers.
 
Rob himself is well known in the property industry, specialising in investment and development work and complex corporate real estate and finance transactions both in the UK and abroad, advising in the office, retail, logistics and high end residential sectors.  Rob has also acted on the real estate finance side for lenders such as HSBC as well as a wide variety of borrowers and recently led the team advising on the acquisition of the Eurohypo loan book by Wells Fargo/Lone Star- a £4bn commercial real estate loan book , which was one of the largest European commercial real estate debt transactions ever.

Going forward, Rob will continue to work with Jon as he takes up his new role and also will be supported by other senior real estate partners in London : Jo Footitt and Lewis Myers.

Paul Firth, National Head of Real Estate at Irwin Mitchell said: