Daniel reflects on two decades building Mishcon's property litigation team from a standing start into a top-ranked, market leading practice.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the inception of the property litigation team at Mishcon. What was the day one vision and how closely does that resemble the property litigation practice at Mishcon today?
When I joined Mishcon in 2006, my ambition was to build a market-leading property litigation team that is trial-ready, strategically minded and commercially astute, with a relentless focus on understanding not just the law but the underlying business issues our clients are facing and how best to help them solve them. That vision sat naturally alongside Mishcon's existing offering and the personal, hands-on way I have always worked with clients and approached contentious matters, and I wanted our team to be trusted advisors as much as a destination litigation house. Two decades on, we are the destination of choice for the most sophisticated clients with significant disputes in the real estate market, a position that reflects that day-one ambition closely. What has made the difference is the team. We have consistently attracted and developed lawyers who are technically outstanding, commercially sharp, genuinely collegiate, and who never lose sight of the fact that it is the client's perspective, not just the legal one, which should inform our advice.
What's the story of how the team has grown in terms of size and specialisms. What has driven that growth?
Our growth has been driven principally by our clients. We watch closely what they're interested in and where their needs are heading, and we deepen our expertise accordingly so that we stay relevant to them and can keep offering a genuinely wide range of service, rather than narrowing into one type of work for one type of client. That variety matters. It is precisely because we don't confine ourselves to a narrow slice of real estate litigation that our clients trust us with matters that go well beyond it. Being a trusted adviser, in the fullest sense, is central to what we do.
We have been careful to grow in a way that reflects client necessity rather than ambition for its own sake. The team has expanded roughly by one person every nine months for some years now, but the point was never simply to get bigger. It was to make sure we could offer the service our clients wanted without diluting the quality or the culture that got us there in the first place.
Alongside that, we have invested deliberately in niche specialisms, including rights of light, telecommunications, rating and the Building Safety Act, because we could see those areas mattering more and more to our clients. Around five years ago we also took the decision to build a separate team within property litigation, focused exclusively on private clients in real estate, an area we felt was under-served.
The team today comprises just over 40 lawyers. It is particularly pleasing to see the strength and depth reflected in the legal directories, with the team ranked Band 1/Tier 1 in both Chambers and Legal 500 and, among the firms in those top bands, having the largest number of individually ranked real estate litigation lawyers.
How has the day-to-day nature of property litigation work changed over the last two decades?
Real estate is an area Parliament largely left alone for a long time, but in the last decade or so that has changed significantly. We have gone from relative legislative quiet to a real estate sector that sits firmly in the eyes of policymakers, and we have had to stay a step ahead of a genuinely significant run of legislative change to keep serving our clients properly. As the market changes and the economic environment shifts, the type of client we act for and what matters most to them changes too, so there is always something new to work out. That, to me, is what makes this work interesting rather than repetitive, and it is why keeping our expertise current is not just a response to legislation but part of how we stay useful to our clients as their own priorities evolve.
What would you say are the biggest shifts you have seen in the types of disputes coming across your desk over the last 20 years?
The biggest shift is that litigation no longer sits in discrete boxes. When I started out, property litigation was very much its own silo. That's no longer true. Every matter now seems to carry a variety of aspects to it, whether that's public law, economic wrongdoing, reputational considerations, regulatory matters or legislative change, so it's genuinely rare for something to land on my desk that is purely a property dispute. That means we need a broader range of skills than we once did.
Straying beyond the traditional confines of property litigation is something of a unique feature of how we work here, and it's part of what keeps the job interesting. It isn't accidental. I have always wanted to do interesting work, and building a team that can move comfortably across those boundaries, working alongside colleagues in public law, reputation and financial services among others, has been a deliberate choice rather than something that happened to us.
What that has done, more than anything, is sharpen the demand from clients for real strategic thinking. The appetite for strategy and considered advice, rather than just technical execution, is stronger now than I have ever seen it. That, to me, is the differentiator.
AI is transforming legal practice generally. How do you think it will affect property litigation practices in particular? What role do you expect technology, including AI, to play in how the team practises a decade from now?
Innovation and transformation sits at the heart of Mishcon's core values and our decision to embrace AI at a very early stage of its entry into the legal sphere was no exception to that (and I consider it something of a small badge of honour for us that we lost a member of the team to a leading AI provider). If we can use AI to take on the work that doesn't need our judgment, it frees up our time, and our clients' money to focus on the things that actually matter: our expertise, our experience and our strategic judgment. That is where the real value sits for clients.
Looking ahead, I expect that approach to continue. As the technology develops, we will keep looking for ways to use it so that we can spend more of our time on the parts of the job that are genuinely important, both to our clients and to us.
There are things AI cannot replicate, and one of the most important is the human connection with clients - understanding the person or business as well as the problem, knowing what matters to them, and giving advice that is genuinely relevant, accessible and specific to their circumstances. That is something we invest heavily in, and I expect it to become more, rather than less, important as technology takes care of more of the things that can be automated.
Where do you see the biggest growth areas or emerging dispute types for property litigation over the next five to ten years?
No one can say with certainty what's coming next, but the way we stay ahead of it is by staying close to our clients' businesses so that we can anticipate what they'll need. The volume of legislative change we've seen recently - building safety, renters' rights, residential leasehold and now commercial leasehold too, means we are dealing with old and new regimes operating against each other, and that in itself is a source of growth in disputes. Beyond that, it is difficult to predict and the breadth of disputes we are involved in, and the areas we invest resource building expertise in, will be driven by the needs of our clients so that we continue to provide strategic, focused and commercial advice as trusted business advisors.
What remains constant is that real estate continues to be a key asset class, and those who own, occupy or invest in it will continue to need expert advice to navigate the increasingly complex legal and commercial challenges that come with it.
As you look ahead to the next 20 years, what is your ambition for the team? What would you want people to say about it at the 40-year mark?
My ambition is to be the people our clients turn to, without hesitation, for their most important and difficult contentious situations. At the 40-year mark, I would want people to say that we were the most trusted advisers when it truly mattered, not just for the standalone crisis or the mission-critical matter, but as a genuine day-to-day adviser they could rely on across everything they needed.
If we've achieved that, everything else, the size of the team, the range of specialisms, will simply have followed from doing that well.