David Ferguson, Stoneleigh Capital

Nabarro has been acting for CDP (Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the largest fund manager in Canada), Stoneleigh’s majority shareholder, ever since they began investing in Europe, which is about 15 years ago. When we set up Stoneleigh, Nabarro incorporated the company, set up the fund, wrote the shareholders agreements, the investment and advisory agreements, the employment contracts - they’ve literally done everything for the company.

Subsequent to that, they’ve acted for us on all our deals. The deals involve the purchase of real estate debt, B notes. Sometimes they can be structured in unusual ways. In fact the very first transaction we did was quite complex and there was a massive amount of time pressure. Nabarro were very helpful. In order to get the deal done on time, they actually stepped in on behalf of the originating lender and wrote the intercreditor agreement.

Since then, we’ve done another seven deals. One was a pan-European hotel transaction in seven different jurisdictions. It was the first of its kind.

Nabarro is very good at focusing on the key issues - pointing out where deals are non-standard, where they’ve seen terms in other deals that are more favourable to the subordinate lender.

Their combination of banking and finance and real estate expertise means we don’t have to use two sets of lawyers. We can go to one team - there's one key point of contact on the deal.

Nabarro are very good at not going too far on things. They’ll soon say: you don’t have to worry about that particular issue, we view this as standard. This allows us to make the decision to move forward more efficiently.

We did about 400% of business plan in the first year. We exceeded expectations. Real estate financing is definitely one of the hot topics in the City at the moment. Going forward, there are a lot of things we can look to do and I will seek advice from Nabarro. They have been extremely helpful in all areas and there’s no reason why we won’t use them for advancing the business.

What I like most about Nabarro is that they’re all very approachable and reasonable people. It makes a world of difference. I’ve used law firms in the past that will slow down a process by arguing with another firm of lawyers and it gets completely out of hand on a non-material issue. Nabarro is very pragmatic. They’re very commercially minded, rather than being in an academic ivory tower.