Henry Clarke

SMEs and family businesses face legal and business challenges as they seek to grow or deal with challenging environments. These challenges are made easier having advisors with commitment, talent and broad experience including of international business. My goal is to help your business grow sustainably in today’s challenging environment.

I am an experienced corporate lawyer and MBA graduate who is expert at guiding your business by managing legal risk, assessing business needs and considering the business in relation to the market and society. I enjoy working as part of SME and family business leadership teams as a sense checker, identifying potential issues so as to avoid them through raising working solutions. I work with clients as:

• Company secretary and non-executive director (NED) – I offer my services as company secretary and a NED on boards of SMEs that value a good leadership team and considered business strategy to prepare themselves for the challenges of expansion, change and succession because of their operational success.
• Board coach for individual director mentoring and the better working of core management teams
• Temporary in-house counsel during busy legal periods for growing SME clients which otherwise do not require full time in-house counsel
• External legal counsel in my specialisms
• Consultant on business resilience planning

• Family Business
• General Counsel Services
• Flexible Retainers
• Start ups and Scale ups
• Banking and Finance
• Construction & Civil Engineering Disputes
• Corporate
• Commercial law

I qualified in 2004 with Magic Circle law firm Clifford Chance and hold a Distinction in my LLM.  I am dual qualified as a solicitor advocate and over the years I have worked for several major international law firms, in house, in Poland and in the Gulf.  I also hold an MBA (Distinction) from an FT Global Top 50 Business School where I received the prize for the best strategic business project on the programme.  I have worked with larger businesses and SMEs in finance, corporate and construction matters.  I have in-house experience of a fast-growing financial services business. I have also served in the British Army as an officer around the world including on three operational tours, leaving Regular service as a Major.

• Corporate
• Finance
• Commercial contracts
• Construction and engineering law
• Joint ventures
• M & A
• Arbitration – I am a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and able to work as an arbitrator in appropriate circumstances