Expertise

Christopher represents corporate, entrepreneurial and UHNW clients from around the world. He helps them to create, grow and protect their business and private wealth.

His work covers the full legal spectrum and is both advisory and transactional. It frequently involves the provision of general counsel and family office-style services.

Christopher has a long-standing involvement with the ports sector in the UK and internationally. He is a non-executive director of The Bristol Port Company and a founder member of UK Port Advisers. He is the Consulting Editor to Halsbury’s Laws of England on Ports & Harbours and he was a member of the British Government’s former UKTI Ports Advisory Group.

He has particular experience of corporate governance, gained from external board appointments and his trusteeships of several significant charitable and private trusts. He is a member of the Greenwich Hospital Advisory Board (a Crown foundation and the Royal Navy’s oldest charity) and was previously a trustee of the Fleet Air Arm Museum and the Tall Ships Youth Trust. Christopher is a Freeman of the City of London.

Recent Experience

• The acquisition of an energy services consultancy for a significant UK membership organisation.
• The disposal by share sale of a non-core manufacturing subsidiary to a European buyer.
• Structuring a partnership between private sector and government interests for an overseas commercial/maritime real estate development.
• The rationalisation and restructuring of an international group of industrial companies.
• Structuring arrangements between shareholders in order to define future scope of business, entrench minority protections and provide succession for future generations.
• The establishment of an alternative business structure (ABS model) for the ownership by non-lawyers of a UK legal services business.
• Creating and implementing a senior executive incentive plan, using a growth share model.
• An off-market buyback of shareholdings in an English company.
• Equity and debt capital raisings for UK companies in the fintech and telecoms sectors.
• The acquisition of an English legal services business by an overseas investor.
• The establishment of North American production facilities for an English trading group.
• Undertaking due diligence and the subsequent restructuring of international supply chains, including material customer contracts, for an international trading group.
• The acquisition of an energy services consultancy for a significant UK membership organisation.

Career History

Christopher joined Wedlake Bell in 2014. Previously he was the managing partner of Tite & Lewis, a UK law firm established in association with PwC and subsequently Ernst & Young. Tite & Lewis merged with Lawrence Graham in 2004, where Christopher led the Corporate group and subsequently the Projects practice.

He was also an executive board member of EY Law, EY’s then global law business, with more than 3,000 lawyers operating in over 30 countries worldwide.

Before establishing Tite & Lewis, Christopher was a partner in Stephenson Harwood, where he was a member of that firm’s Management Board and specialised in cross-border corporate transactions. He qualified as a solicitor in 1985.