Leading Isle of Man commercial law firm, Cains Advocates Limited (Cains), has announced key management changes at the firm. Peter Clucas, Director and Head of Cains’ litigation department, has been appointed as the new Managing Director of a board of Directors who together have over 60 years’ experience with Cains – and which also comprises Robert Colquitt, Tim Shepherd, Tristan Head and Mike Edwards. The team has assumed responsibility for the management of Cains on 1 July 2018 and, in addition to fulfilling management duties, will continue to service the needs of Cains’ local and international clients.
The management changes follow the decisions of Andrew Corlett OBE, Richard Vanderplank, Seth Caine and Jeremy Walton to step down as Directors of Cains and to become consultants with the firm. They will continue to serve Cains’ clients, as well as to assist the new management as Cains moves to the next stage in its development.
As part of the wider changes, it has also been announced that Mike Pinson, a senior lawyer in Cains’ corporate department, has retired from the firm at the end of June 2018 after more than 20 years with the firm.
These changes are the result of long-standing and amicable succession planning and also mark a new chapter for the firm following the sale in 2017 of Cains Fiduciaries Limited to Isle of Man based First Names Group. They represent the latest stage of an evolving strategy to focus on, and further grow, Cains’ core service offerings for local and international clients of first class legal services in the areas of corporate and commercial, finance, commercial litigation and commercial real estate.
To support this growth, the firm has recently made several strategic hires. Scott Leonard-Morgan and Garry Manley have joined the firm’s corporate team, in each case, to advise, amongst other things, on cross-border mergers and acquisitions, private equity investments, corporate finance and restructuring. Both Scott and Garry have extensive experience internationally and further strengthen Cains’ corporate offering. Scott began his corporate advisory career at Simmons & Simmons and was a partner at the London offices of a U.S. law firm before spending a number of years in-house in the financial services and payments industries sectors. Prior to joining Cains, Garry spent almost a decade working for Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP in London, Hong Kong and New York.
In addition, and as announced in early 2018, David Doyle, the former First Deemster and Clerk of the Rolls for the Isle of Man, is returning to private practice and will join Cains as a senior lawyer in November in the firm’s litigation department .
Peter Clucas, Managing Director at Cains, comments:
“I am delighted to have been appointed as Managing Director and am looking forward to working with my fellow Directors and everyone at the firm, to take Cains forward into its next phase of growth. Cains’ core practice areas are consistently ranked in the top tier by international legal directories and we continue to advise and attract a wide range of local and international clients. With the support of our dedicated staff, I am confident that we will be able to build on the many successes already achieved by the firm as we look to expanding our core practice areas further through both internal growth and external hires.”
“I would like to take this opportunity to thank Andrew, Richard, Seth and Jeremy for their exceptional vision and hard work over the past two decades, which have contributed to making Cains the thriving, independent international law firm it is today, as well as their considerable contribution to the on-going development of the Isle of Man as an international finance centre. I am looking forward to working closely with them in their new roles as consultants to the firm.”
Andrew Corlett OBE, former Managing Director and a consultant at Cains, comments:
“It has been a great privilege to have been Managing Director of Cains for the last 20 years and I have greatly enjoyed seeing the firm flourish and grow. As a result of collective hard work from everybody, Cains has achieved many successes, including being the only law firm in the Crown Dependencies and British Offshore Territories to win the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in International Trade; I would like to congratulate Peter on his appointment and look forward to the new management achieving many more successes as they take the helm and as this new chapter at the firm begins.”
