Top Ten Tax & Trust Lawyers

Jonathan Conder is a man revitalised, having handed over the mantle of private client practice head to Piers Barclay after 12 years at the helm.

‘That has freed up a lot of my week from admin, thank goodness,’ he says. ‘I thoroughly enjoyed the job but I’m doing much more client work now, which I love.’

The year since Conder last spoke with Spear’s has been one of two halves. ‘The first [half] was characterised by relatively normal level work for traditional clients, conducted under the light of the non-dom changes which had been in consultation since 2015.’ But things became frenetic at the start of 2017: ‘We needed all hands on deck. The partners stopped travelling and we hunkered down and did the work with a hard deadline of 5 April. Then the Finance Bill didn’t happen – it got all derailed [by the snap election]. If there’s one thing we’ve learned it’s that anything can happen!’

Conder relays how the political class (‘I worry that they’ve forgotten what they’re meant to be doing, which is implementing Brexit’), the increasingly attractive tax regimes in other countries, and the antsiness of banks (‘if they don’t get what they want they won’t wait for two years, they might give us until Christmas’) are all causing concern.