Osborne Clarke announces corporate team leadership changes

Published by

Peter Davison

Mark Wesker, Helen Parsonage, and Will Robertson

Law firm Osborne Clarke has announced new leadership appointments across its international corporate and commercial teams and UK business transactions practice group (BTG), including new leadership appointments in the firm’s Bristol office.

Bristol-based Mark Wesker, previously international financial services sector leader takes over as head of BTG, UK. As practice group head, Mark will oversee the UK corporate, financial institutions and commercial teams, and will also sit on the firm's executive board.

Mark's career at the firm spans fifteen years, having made partner in 2014. He is a highly experienced corporate lawyer, regularly advising on a broad range of matters including business strategy, M&A, takeovers, IPOs, fundraising, joint ventures, restructuring and corporate governance.

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Helen Parsonage, who is based in Bristol, is heading up the firm's Financial Institutions Group in the UK. She specialises in fund formation in the alternative asset space, with experience of multiple asset classes but with a particular focus on private equity and venture capital funds. Helen also acts for a variety of investors with regard to fund investments and segregated mandates.

Will Robertson, from the Bristol office, is taking over as UK head of commercial. Specialising in technology and privacy, he has acted for a number of household names on a variety of commercial, IT and privacy matters. Much of Will’s work is in the retail sector, advising clients on their cross channels offerings and negotiating contracts in support of that.

Reading-based Greg Leyshon concludes his role as Head of BTG and will take on the newly-created position as co-chair of the international corporate group. Working alongside Björn Hürten, they will focus on building and strengthening Osborne Clarke's international corporate practice to support its 2025 strategy and beyond.

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Having been with the firm for almost thirty years, Greg has built a wealth of private equity, corporate practice and market knowledge that makes him an asset to his clients – many of whose relationships with him span more than a decade.

Osborne Clarke's BTG practice group has 60 partners and over 140 fee-earners working across London, Reading and Bristol and accounts for around a third of the UK business.

The team produces an annual corporate M&A outlook each year that looks at deal terms trends and predicts deal characteristics and activity for the coming year.

Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country. An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts. Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.