French speaking

The team members are either native French or fluent French speakers. Drawing together expertise from across our firm, the team provides legal expertise based on a practical understanding of the respective legal systems and business cultures, and the economic and cultural distinctions between the UK and France, Belgium, Switzerland and African countries. Members of the team practice in all of our core departments.

Through our dedicated team of French-speaking lawyers, we provide legal services covering dispute resolution, arbitration, insurance, corporate, M&A, private equity, venture capital, commercial, real estate, construction, finance, fraud, estate and wealth planning, tax and family law.

Our clients include businesses from all francophone jurisdictions looking to invest or operate in the UK. Clients come to us for our deep understanding of the French legal system, and French business culture, as well as of other francophone civil law jurisdictions, knowing they will be better understood and guided through their UK operations.

Our French desk has well-established relationships with a network of local law firms in France and other francophone regions and can call on assistance from key specialists across a number of legal areas. Working with our partner law firms, we are uniquely well placed to advise our UK based clients on the international aspects of their operations. We also have significant experience acting as co-counsel with our partner law firms on cross-border disputes that straddle common and civil law.

• Acting for an engineering company in an oil platform production contract dispute with a North African state-owned oil company which involved credit risk insurance issues and an ICC arbitration in Paris.
• Acting for a portfolio company of Vendis Capital (a private equity fund based in Brussels) on the acquisition of two UK consumer healthcare businesses.
• Advising on the acquisition of a UK sustainable packaging company by a French private equity fund.
• Acting for a global mining company in relation to a dispute under an Earn-In Agreement relating to an interest in a gold mine in Guinea.
• French family retailing conglomerate – project managing the purchase of a substantial residential property in Hampstead, London. The transaction involved complex financial arrangements that included international trust issues.
• Masternaut UK Ltd, known as Masternaut Three X – acquisition by Masternaut International, a subsidiary of Hub Télécom owned by Europe’s second largest airport operator, Aéroports de Paris. The deal created Europe’s largest fully integrated telematics, mobile resource and fleet management solutions organisation
• Adventurous Journeys Capital Partners and other investors – disposal of Hotel Saint–Barth Isle de France to LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world’s largest luxury products group. The five star hotel, located on Flamands Bay on the Caribbean island of St Barthélemy, has won numerous awards.
• Acting for 7 x defendants who are French, Swiss and Monogasque nationals and companies who have been sued in the UK for trademark and copyright infringement connected to the sale of a business which is also subject to linked legal proceedings in Switzerland.
• Acted as co-counsel for the Republic of Cameroon (SNH) in the defence of ICSID arbitration proceedings related to the sale of gas from the first onshore producing gas field (Logbaba) in Cameroonian history. Cameroonian law is a facsimile of French law.