Chums on Seats - Clyde & Co

Clyde & Co

CLYDE & Co appointed three new shipping partners earlier this year. They include Bertrand Courtois, who is based in Clyde’s Paris office. One of his areas of specialisation is ship arrest, and he has written on that subject elsewhere in this magazine. New partner Dominic Lee has been working in Clyde’s Hong Kong office since 1992 and his work embraces insurance and aviation litigation in addition to shipping and international trade. The third shipping specialist appointed was Richard Barnett. Based in the London office, he has a broad experience of shipping, insurance and sale of goods litigation. These appointments take the number of Clyde & Co partners to ninety.

Richards Butler

RICHARDS Butler has promoted two members of its admiralty and shipping group to partners. Stephen Kirkpatrick has spent four years in the firm’s Hong Kong office, where he was admitted as a solicitor, and his areas of expertise include P&I and defence work, charter disputes, cargo liabilities and marine insurance.

Frank Sanford follows the trend for maritime law firms to employ ex-seamen. He served with the British Merchant Navy for eleven years, obtaining his master mariner’s certificate in 1986, for which he received the Griffiths Award. For the next three years Seaford studied law at Cambridge University. During vacations he worked at the London Steamship Owners P&I Club and then for the Richards Butler Admiralty Group. He joined the firm full time in 1990 and qualified as a solicitor in 1992. Seaford is a member of RB’s Admiralty & Shipping Group Casualty Response Team.

ILU

DAVID Taylor has succeeded Tony Nunn as Governmental & International Affairs Adviser to the Institute of London Underwriters (ILU). His appointment was announced in March and he joined the ILU in June from Clifford Chance to work alongside Tony Nunn before Nunn retired on August 15.

Taylor brings a breadth of experience to his new role. His introduction to the maritime world was as legal manager of the UK Chamber of Shipping from 1970 to 1972. After that he returned to private practice with Hill Taylor Dickinson, where he was managing partner for five years.

He is honorary secretary to the Association of Average Adjusters and was chairman of the CMI’s subcommittee concerned with the revision of the law of General Average and the York Antwerp Rules, 1990 - 94, culminating in the 1994 revision adopted in Sydney (see article on the CMI in this issue).

He has spent the last seven years working for Clifford Chance, where his role was very much one of a roving ambassador for the firm, with a specific remit to develop its maritime and international trade practice worldwide as well as its marine insurance practice in the London market.

Taylor will represent the ILU at a range of international maritime and insurance organisations and will act as permanent secretary of the London market’s Joint Hull Committee. He will be interviewed in the next issue of The Maritime Advocate, when he will talk about his new role and his hopes for the development of Alternative Dispute Resolution.

Nunn better

IT has been a bad year for marine insurance. Never mind the casualty figures, or the rates softer than jelly. Underwriting has seen two of its stalwarts ride off into the sunset of retirement. It was bad enough when Lars Lindfelt started breaking in his successor at the Swedish Club. Now Tony Nunn has finally called it a day at the Institute of London Underwriters. I’m still trying to get used to the idea.

A suitably big and merry crowd gathered at the ILU headquarters in London recently to mark Tony’s official retirement. Tony, the marine insurance market’s man for all seasons, has given up arguably the longest title in the City - Governmental and International Affairs Adviser to the Institute of London Underwriters. But it is not particularly in that role that he will be remembered.

Tony Nunn will be remembered as a knowledgable and cogent spokesman for the industry he served for fifty years, the more so since his industry has produced so few people who have been able to be just that. He made insurance respectable in shipping circles. What’s more, he was never rude or condescending to journalists, when so many others were, with less reason. He suffered fools gladly.

It is clear that Tony will be missed by his staff, and by everybody who knew him. Tony made a lot of noise for a smallish man, but most of it is was well worth listening to. The ILU presented him with a golf trolley bigger than himself, but I find it difficult to imagine Tony spending the next forty years on the golf course, great sportsman though he is. I expect to see him resurface again very soon, in some capacity or other. It’s too quiet without him.