December 2018

Lennox Paton ranked as Top Tier Firm in The Legal 500

This is the first year that ‘The Bahamas’ has been included in The Legal 500 Caribbean and Lennox Paton have entered the table as a Top Tier Firm.

Well done to all the team and our ranked lawyers who cover all our key practice areas: Brian Simms QC, Michael Paton, Sophia Rolle Kapousouzoglou, Marco Turnquest, Castino Sands and David Johnstone.

The full write up can be seen below

As ‘a highly organised and professional firm‘, Lennox Paton is ‘always positive and supportive‘, ‘provides a welcoming atmosphere to clients‘ and ‘has deep local knowledge paired with a practical approach‘; its key departments are litigation, financial services and corporate law, and real estate.

The litigation team, which ‘gives clients a sense of increasing confidence that cases have a high chance of success whatever missiles might come from the opposition‘ and is ‘one of the strongest litigation teams in the Bahamas‘, focuses on commercial litigation, including expertise in trust matters, banking, insolvency, asset tracing and property litigation, as well as mutual fund and shareholder disputes, director liability and company law, and insurance. Highlights included the team acting for Deloitte (Hong Kong and Bahamas), as the joint receiver-managers of the secured assets of the Baha Mar Resort, on numerous matters, one of which produced a ruling that clarified the practice of conveyancing pursuant to new limitation legislation in the Bahamas. 

In transactional matters, the practice is well known for general business law, with a particular focus on the financial services industry; complex cross-border M&A; regulatory advice in relation to the cross-border issue of securities and banking services; establishing investment funds for institutional and private wealth management clients; and complex trust structures. The team advised Frontera Energy, as Bahamian counsel, on its issuance of senior secured notes that were to be listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange. 

Senior partner and ‘one of the best litigators on the island‘ Brian Simms QC is the head of litigation and is well known for complex, high-net-worth commercial disputes. Deputy chairman since 2017 of the Securities Commission of The Bahamas, Michael Paton, who has ‘exceptional knowledge and an ability to quickly understand the information sought and provide the necessary feedback‘, heads the firm’s corporate and commercial, investment funds and banking and finance groups; and David Johnstone, who is highly rated for master-planning mixed-use resorts with subdivision, condominium, condohotel and timeshare components, leads the real estate, resort development and private client groups. Other notable partners are litigation specialists Sophia Rolle-Kapousouzoglou (who clients praise as ‘responsive and a pleasure to work with‘) and Marco Turnquest, and banking and finance group partner Castino Sands, who is ‘thorough, careful and precise‘.