Partnership & members' agreements
The constitution of your firm, drafted to reflect how it actually runs: ownership, capital, decision-making, profit-sharing, exits. Agreements that hold when relationships don't.
The firm behind the firms.
Most firms have clients in professional services. Very few have made the firms themselves their life's work.
We advise partnerships and LLPs on the agreements that bind them, the disputes that test them and the deals that transform them — a corporate, employment, disputes and regulatory team working as one group, because a firm's hardest problems never respect departmental lines.
What follows is the record: what we have done, what we do, and who does it.
§ 1 · The record
Seven matters
Matters that changed the market they were in.
Ordered as the group sets it. Sort by year or by kind if you would rather read it another way.
Order
| Year | Matter | Kind |
|---|---|---|
| 20171 |
Bond Dickinson and Womble CarlyleAdvising Bond Dickinson LLP on its combination with Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, creating a transatlantic firm of around a thousand lawyers. Two partnerships on two sides of the Atlantic, each with its own constitution, capital structure and regulator, agreeing to become one — the structural question the sector has been asking ever since. |
Merger |
| 20081 |
Vestra Wealth LLP v UBSActing for Vestra Wealth LLP against UBS Wealth Management in one of the City's landmark team-move disputes. The questions it turned on — what a departing partner may plan, when a duty of fidelity bites, what a firm can actually restrain — are the ones every lateral move has been argued around since. |
Litigation |
| 20111 |
Eaton v Caulfield [2011] BCC 386Acting for the successful petitioner in a leading authority on unfair prejudice in LLPs — law that partnerships still navigate by. |
Reported authority |
| 20181 |
Bircham Dyson Bell and PitmansAdvising BDB on the merger that created BDB Pitmans: structure, member approvals and execution. |
Merger |
| 20181 |
Hunton & Williams and Andrews Kurth KenyonAdvising on the English elements of a transatlantic combination of two US firms with London practices. |
Merger |
| —2 |
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & RosatiAdvising on the establishment of its London office — Silicon Valley's counsel, arriving in the City. |
Establishment |
| —2 |
Town Legal LLPConstitutional change through a growth phase. Running. |
Constitution |
§ 2 · What we do
Eight areas
Every chapter of a firm's life.
Conversions & restructuring
General partnership to LLP; LLPs and companies combined in group structures; new service entities. We designed several of the structures the sector now treats as standard.
Partner & team moves
Lateral hires, team lift-outs and defections — for the firm gaining, the firm losing, or the partners moving. Restrictive covenants, garden leave, repudiation.
Partnership disputes
Expulsions, deadlock, discrimination claims, unfair prejudice, dissolution. Contentious partnership work of the highest sensitivity, handled discreetly and, where it is called for, not discreetly at all.
Mergers of professional firms
Domestic and transatlantic combinations: diligence, structure, member approvals, integration.
Regulation
SRA and professional-body regulation, authorisation, ABS structures, and the rules that shape how firms may own, operate and grow.
Partner remuneration & equity
Lockstep, contribution and hybrid models; capital, drawings and retirement.
Succession & governance
Boards, management committees, voting thresholds, and what happens when the founders stop.
§ 3 · Who's who
Seventeen
Advisers to advisers.
Senior Associate
Anjali Aravindhan
Partner
David Butler
Associate
Joseph Cannon
Partner
Joanna Chatterton
Partner
Tom Custance
Senior Partner
Gavin Foggo
Highly sensitive contentious matters: team moves, partner exits, and the disputes firms cannot afford to lose.
Legal Director
Ed Livingstone
Partner
Jane Mann
Legal Director
Tom Pennington-Hare
Partner
Aron Pope
Legal Director
Rebecca Richardson
Partner
Sacha Schoenfeld
Partner
Lucy Sorell
Legal Director
Adèle Standard
Partner · Head of Group
Daniel Sutherland
Restructurings, LLP conversions and cross-border joint ventures, with particular depth in the legal sector.
Senior Associate
Stephanie Tsang
Senior Associate
Grace Waterhouse
§ 4 · How we work
Three notes
Old judgement, new tools.
We build, not only advise
The group writes its own drafting software: a document-builder that produces first-draft members' agreements, engagement letters and resolutions from plain-English questionnaires, in the firm's house style, with live cross-references.
Machines where they help
An AI programme under a formal confidentiality and governance protocol, with a stated line between what a machine drafts and what a partner decides.
Knowledge that compounds
Precedent banks and playbooks built from decades of partnership work, so each matter starts further on than the last one finished.
Enquiries
Fox Williams LLP
psg@foxwilliams.com
Fox Williams LLP · 10 Finsbury Square · London EC2A 1AF · foxwilliams.com
- 1 Dates and citations are drawn from published sources and are provisional: they require checking against the firm's own records before this page is published. The citation shown for Eaton v Caulfield is as reported by the firm.
- 2 An em dash in the year column means the matter is continuing, or that no single date describes it. It does not mean the date is missing.
A design concept for the Fox Williams Professional Services Group, built as a document rather than a landing page. This is not the firm's official website; for that, see foxwilliams.com.
Set in Playfair Display and Open Sans — the firm's own two faces, self-hosted. Playfair carries every display line; Open Sans is confined to body text, tabular figures and labels. Six type sizes, re-declared at each of three breakpoints; tracking and leading set per size. Vertical space is a multiple of one line of body text. No scroll animation, no reveal on entry, no reading-time estimate, no progress bar. Third version of this concept; the first two are elsewhere.