Harbottle & Lewis expands legal team

Harbottle & Lewis today announced two lateral partner hires to strengthen its client offering. Private client disputes partner Charles Lloyd and reputation management partner Michael Yates will both join the firm in April 2025.

Charles Lloyd arrives at Harbottle & Lewis from Macfarlanes where he has held a leading position within his field for over 30 years, specialising in private client disputes, particularly international trusts and estates litigation. Charles’s client base includes high net worth individuals engaged in complex family and succession-related disputes, often involving multi-jurisdictional offshore trust and corporate structures. Charles’s eminent reputation and extensive experience will enable the firm to build on its leading private client practice with a specific focus on enhancing the contentious work that it does in this space. Charles commented "I am really looking forward to joining Harbottle & Lewis and what is already a strong and highly reputed private client practice. This move provides a great opportunity for me to help build on the firm’s existing expertise and will enable me to contribute towards creating a leading private client disputes practice."

Michael Yates joins Harbottle & Lewis from international law firm Taylor Wessing. As an information litigator, Michael advises high net worth and high-profile individuals and companies on reputation management, privacy protection, confidentiality, cyber response and media and information law disputes. His expertise aligns perfectly with Harbottle & Lewis’s renowned proficiency in the media, entertainment, technology and private wealth sectors. Michael’s significant focus on cyber response dovetails with the firm's strategic emphasis on technology, and he will work alongside the firm’s technology and data lawyers to further develop its services in this area. Michael said "I’m delighted to be joining the firm’s market leading media and information group and am very excited to soon be working alongside the firm’s fantastic media, tech, data and cyber experts. I look forward to working with clients to help them navigate what is an ever more hostile and complex media and information landscape, protecting them from threats to their reputation, privacy and information and mitigating the increasing risk of cyber attacks. There is no better place to do this work."

This strategic expansion underscores Harbottle & Lewis’s commitment to bolstering its highly-regarded private client practice and enhancing its offering to high net worth and often high-profile individuals, as well as expanding and deepening its offering to companies. The addition of Charles and Michael to the partnership demonstrates the firm’s ambition to grow and to provide clients with unparalleled expertise across a spectrum of legal services. Tony Littner, co-managing partner at Harbottle & Lewis commented "The addition of two such high quality lawyers to our partnership supports the strategic growth of our firm. Focusing deliberately on extending our offering to both our private client and corporate client base, Charles and Michael are perfectly placed to complement our existing practice groups and contribute significantly to our continued growth and success.”

Photo - L-R Michael Yates and Charles Lloyd