New Appointments Include National Head Of Commercial Litigation

Top 20 law firm Irwin Mitchell has again signalled its intention to expand and build a market-leading Business Legal Services (BLS) division with the announcement that it has made three more high profile appointments.

The first of the trio of senior lawyers is Nigel Kissack, who will join IM as partner and National Head of Commercial Litigation to drive further growth in the team across the UK. In addition to Nigel, Irwin Mitchell has added IP partner, Alex Newman, and trade mark attorney, Kirsten Doherty, who joins as a Consultant.

The latest strategic appointments take the total number of new BLS partners to join Irwin Mitchell since the beginning of 2012 to 18, with 10 now having joined in 2013 alone.

Niall Baker, partner and chief executive of Irwin Mitchell’s Business Legal Service division, added: “We are delighted and excited with these new appointments and confident that each of them will play a key role in continuing the strong progress that BLS has made. They are lawyers of the highest calibre and, like all of our other recent hires, they share our vision and recognise the strong position we are in to take advantage of growth opportunities in the current legal market.”

Nigel Kissack, previously Head of Litigation at Pinsent Masons for 15 years, specialises in resolving disputes for private and listed companies, in the manufacturing, technology, finance, retail and energy sectors. He is experienced in international arbitration and acts as a court appointed supervisor of search and seize orders. Nigel is a qualified mediator and also has experience in dealing with listed company regulatory matters.

Joining in early November 2013, he will be based in Irwin Mitchell’s London office and be responsible for expanding the firm’s national commercial litigation team which already spans five cities.

Contentious IP specialist Alex Newman previously led Squire Sanders’ intellectual property practice in the North of England. With a focus on the technology and engineering sectors in particular, he advises clients in relation to all contentious matters which touch on intellectual property rights (IPR), ranging from patent infringement and validity proceedings in the Patents Court, to pre-litigation advice in relation to brewing contractual disputes which have IPR as their core subject matter. He also advises in relation to IPR creation, registration and exploitation at strategic and transaction-specific levels.
 
Alex, who will also be joining the firm in early November, will be based at Irwin Mitchell’s Leeds offices on Wellington Place and will work alongside partner, Joanne Bone, who specialises in non-contentious areas of IP. 

Following news in September that cross border IP partner, Georgie Collins, had joined the firm in the London office, Alex’s appointment also coincides with that of Kirsten Doherty. Kirsten is a qualified UK and European trade mark attorney and joins Irwin Mitchell as a consultant having worked with Georgie at Brown Rudnick and Lawrence Graham. She was formerly in-house trade mark counsel at easyGroup where she was solely responsible for the prosecution and enforcement of the easyGroup trade mark portfolio which includes the easyJet, easyCar and easyHotel trade marks, working directly with Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou.

Irwin Mitchell’s BLS team also recently announced the appointment of restructuring partner John Vickery from DLA Piper in Manchester. Other senior partner appointments include Chris Rawstron, who heads up the BLS division in Birmingham, banking and finance partners Jon Bew and Andrew Watson, and real estate partners Roy Beckett, Patrick Duffy, Tony Weightman and Anita Weightman.