Nicholas Thompsell

My practice draws on my experience developed over more than 25 years of the fields of corporate, partnership law and financial services law to allow me to advise on complex issues and structures, particularly within the financial services industry. I particularly enjoy dealing with innovative transactions where there is a complex regulatory and/or tax background or where a new solution is being applied either to a new or an old problem.

When I began my training at Slaughter and May both "Big Bang" - the 1980s major reform of financial services regulation - and the first wave of privatisations were under way. These two movements have been underlying themes to my career ever since, sometimes combined within projects where I have been advising government in relation to financial services businesses and often separately. My career has taken me into other specialist industries such as transport, where I have developed a leading reputation, and other areas of regulation such as legal regulation.

My long-standing interest in partnership law and LLPs has combined well with my even longer involvement with the financial services industry so that, unusually, I combine knowledge of how professional partnerships work with knowledge of how to use partnerships within investment structures. More recently I have focused more of my practice on the financial services space.

The extent of my interest is reflected in the range of my publications - I am the author of the chapter on business structures in Sweet & Maxwell’s Working with Technology and part of the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia of Professional Partnerships and I have written articles for various publications and spoken at conferences on various topics ranging from capitalisation of financial mutuals, applications of aspects of the AIFMD and uses of LLP structures.