Hill Dickinson adds Leeds restructuring team with three lateral hires

Hill Dickinson is pleased to announce the addition of a full Restructuring practice to its Leeds office with the appointment of two more lateral hires.

Lizzy Wood and Molly Rowell have reunited with Restructuring partner Lemi McAuley, who joined the firm earlier this year, to complete a trio of lateral hires from Shoosmiths.

Since joining the firm in August, Lemi McAuley has led on setting up the Leeds restructuring practice, bolstering Hill Dickinson’s national restructuring team and expanding its capabilities into the Yorkshire market.

Legal director Wood will assist the team in acting for corporates, private equity investors, lenders and office holders. Her work will focus primarily on all aspects of corporate turnaround and formal insolvency procedures, notably corporate restructuring and distressed business sales.

Completing the team, Rowell joins as an associate, following three years at Shoosmiths where she progressed from corporate paralegal through to associate.

The addition of the Restructuring team comes at a time of sustained growth for Hill Dickinson, building upon the firm’s rapidly growing service offering in Leeds. It comes amid a number of key lateral hires for the firm in the region over the past 10 months, including corporate partner Alison Starr, construction partner Anjon Mallik and health real estate partner James Atkins.

With the Leeds team now numbering more than 40 people and growing, Hill Dickinson has also recently announced a planned move to new offices at 11 Wellington Place in 2024. The move will allow the firm to continue growing its core service offering and bolstering its wider national offering within the Yorkshire market.

Craig Scott, head of the Business Services Group at Hill Dickinson, said: “The addition of a Restructuring team in Leeds is the latest step in our plans to further expand our Restructuring offering nationally. It is part of our strategy of investing in talented and ambitious teams who are committed to helping us grow our Hill Dickinson Leeds office over the long term. We’re building on our early successes in the city, having opened in 2017 with a purely health-focused practice, then adding several teams from within our Business Services Group, such as Corporate, Real Estate, Construction and Employment. We expect to announce further hires over the next few months.”

He added: “The growth of our business services offering in Leeds, together with our planned move to larger, more sustainable Leeds offices in 2024, reflects our long-term commitment to the city and our clients in the wider Yorkshire market. It’s also a measure of our ambition to have quality teams on the ground in all our key locations across the UK that plug into and enhance our overall national strength and growth strategy as a firm.”

Lemi McAuley, partner at Hill Dickinson, said: “Having recently joined Hill Dickinson to set up the firm’s new restructuring practice in Leeds, I am delighted to welcome Lizzy and Molly to the team. As an established team, we know the Leeds market well already and expect to hit the ground running. Over the next few months, we’ll be introducing our clients to the firm, building on new opportunities and benefiting from the added strength of the firm’s restructuring capability nationally.”

Hill Dickinson’s Leeds office has grown from three people in 2017 to more than 40 today, including 12 partners, providing a full service offering to the firm’s Business Services and Health sector clients.