- Neil Palmer
- Partner, London
- Field Fisher Waterhouse
- neil.palmer@ffw.com
-
work
+44 (0)20 7861 4268
Neil Palmer is a corporate and commercial lawyer. He advises on all
aspects of public and private sector corporate transactions
including acquisitions and disposals, joint
ventures, reorganisations and
restructurings. He advises in a variety of sectors, including
the public sector (in which he has advised on a large number of
large transition projects and major change programmes), the
financial services sector (where he has
acted on the merger of a number of financial institutions) but also
the transport, healthcare and
not-for-profit sectors.
Neil enjoys the challenge of advising on novel
multi-faceted deals, and is familiar with working with large teams
of lawyers and acting as a single point of contact for the client
in managing external legal resource. He is also a strong project
manager, with the ability to oversee and ensure the completion of
large-scale projects over often challenging timeframes.
Neil has more than 15 years’ experience of
advising clients in the public sector. During this time he has
built up an in depth knowledge and expertise of how this diverse
and challenging sector operates. His particular area of focus is
advising public sector bodies on transition projects and major
change programmes, including the establishment, restructuring and
transformation of Government agencies and businesses and advising
on new governance and constitutional structures. Neil also advises
clients on a wide variety of commercial agreements including
partnerships, joint ventures and other collaborative arrangements,
procurements, customer and supplier agreements and confidentiality
agreements.
Neil has a keen interest in mutualisation and
employee ownership structures, and also the recent Government moves
to embed a culture of social enterprise and mutuals in the wider
public sector. He has extensive experience of spinning out mutuals
and has advised on 4 significant deals in the 2011/2012 financial
year. Neil helped co-author the Cabinet Office guide on how to
become an employee-owned mutual and has also co-authored a tool kit
on mutualisation for the web-based legal resource, Practical Law
for Companies.
Neil regularly participates in seminars and
workshops focusing on mutualisation and structural change.
These have included conducting a workshop with NHS managers
on key lessons learned in managing structural change within the
NHS, chairing a workshop on public sector mergers, reorganisations
and abolitions with a number of government clients, and speaking at
the National Audit Office conference in December 2010 on the
transformation to social enterprise. Most recently, Neil
spoke at the Employee Ownership Association conference in November
2011 on mutual structures in the public sector.
“The team have all commented on the
pleasure it was working with Neil [Palmer] … he remained at all
times professional but with a humanistic, easy going and very
approachable nature which I think gave both the team and myself the
confidence that we would deliver, in the short time frame and that
whatever was signed would be in our best interest.”
Chief Executive, New Social Enterprise
Company