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David Laws
David has been a qualified solicitor since 1984 and was already working within the legal profession for some years before that. Until March 2006 he was one of the senior partners in a progressive and modern 10 partner law firm with a commercial bias. His work as a solicitor was always primarily litigation based and his specialist areas of practice for the last 12 years were in commercial dispute resolution (otherwise known as commercial litigation).
 This involved him in the conduct of very complex large scale and high value domestic and international commercial/common law litigation, arbitration and mediation. He handled these as leader of whatever lawyer structure was in place to deal with the particular case. This included for example, a number of significant cases involved in the oil industry in the UK, Nigeria, Mexico and Scandinavian water sectors. Those cases involved international joint venture and sensitive local jurisdictional issues.
In addition he undertook an interlinked series of shareholder control issues involving the profits and application of ultra deep spallation drilling technology in the UK and US in particular, also involving argument over the ownership of US litigation proceeds. These claims involved mediation by the foremost mediators in the UK and ground breaking argument in relation to abuse of confidence.
He has also handled ultra sensitive emergency closure of a large UK company and its involvement in a series of pieces of litigation in the commercial and environmental fields and has also been extensively involved in intellectual property issues.
He has been described by others as having fantastic team building capacities, a fastidious approach to case preparation, weeding out the unnecessary and focussing on the critical, being an effective negotiator and having sound judgment - allied with a warmth and approachability to clients.
The combination of these matters and the inevitable depth of involvement within the businesses concerned together with the role of partner in the firm provided a very considerable breadth of knowledge and experience in the business world as a whole many management skills into the bargain.
Going back further; between 1988 and 1994 before merging with a larger solicitors’ practice, he was technically a sole practitioner engaged in a very wide variety of business issues ranging from setting up partnerships to assisting in business rescue. That practice was run jointly with his wife and current business partner in lawcol-one, Jackie Collinson. Even at that stage they perceived a need for something beyond merely the world of the lawyer. With that in mind they established a separate arm of that firm called “In Business”. Through this they assisted small to medium sized businesses in various ways e.g. from how to prepare a cash-flow forecast to setting up an entire new business.
At a personal level, David is married to Jackie and has two sons and two step-sons. His hobbies are travel, walking, sailing, reading and being involved with his local Rotary Club (of which he is currently secretary). He had long held the ambition to write a book and recently managed to do so as a result of taking time out to travel the world for a year before he and Jackie returned to England to establish lawcol-one so now he likes to add "writing" to the list. |
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