Temple Bright hires high profile City corporate partner
08/01/2025
Temple Bright has expanded its London team with the hire of highly regarded corporate lawyer, Nick Cheshire. Nick previously worked at Ashurst LLP for 24 years in its London corporate practice, where he was a partner for 16 years.
Nick has extensive private company advisory experience particularly in the banking, financial services and real estate sectors, with wider experience in the hospitality, life sciences, media and insurance sectors. He advises a broad range of clients including regulated financial institutions, entrepreneurs, family investment offices, specialist private capital investors and private entities on acquisitions and disposals, joint ventures, private capital investment, internal restructurings, shareholder agreements, strategic partnerships and general corporate compliance matters.
Nick said: “Joining Temple Bright is an exciting opportunity for me to advise a broad range of clients, who require pragmatic commercial legal advice from an experienced specialist, through a streamlined operational model.
“I have been aware of the growing group of non-traditional law firms and was interested in exploring how such firms can enable lawyers to advise their clients in a different way. What distinguished Temple Bright was the unremitting emphasis on quality in its messaging, which was backed up by the founders in person.
“The firm only recruits the best and maintains the traditional priorities for careful growth and a cohesive firm culture. This makes it the perfect fit for an experienced City lawyer wishing to continue and develop a thriving practice.”
Tim Summers, co-founder of Temple Bright, said: “We are delighted to welcome Nick Cheshire, a corporate star from a leading international firm, Ashurst.
“The addition of Nick is a major boost to our corporate advisory practice and given his broad sector expertise, our partners across all practice areas are excited at the prospect of collaborating with him.”
Launched in 2010, Temple Bright is a firm of 76 partners from a City and leading regional firm background, with offices in London EC2 and Bristol. It operates a non-traditional structure that it calls a “chambers practice,” making a comparison with barristers in chambers. As a “new model” law firm, it distinguishes itself from other such firms by its priority to preserve the best virtues of traditional firms: selectivity, working in teams, and a distinctive service for clients.
The Temple Bright service involves four promises – City quality; reasonable fees; senior lawyers; responsiveness – which the firm keeps through its streamlined model.
Tim Summers said: “We think Temple Bright offers both clients and lawyers something unique. We are a cohesive group of partners who work in a distinctive style, without delegation to juniors, with autonomy and flexibility.
“Instead of prioritising firm growth, like many new model firms, we have maintained a single-minded dedication to quality. We want to be a viable alternative to the traditional City firm, for clients at every stage of growth.
“Our ability to attract lawyers of Nick’s calibre is a vindication of our approach.”
Last year the firm recruited leading pensions specialist Rosalind Connor, a former chair of the Association of Pension Lawyers who was a partner at Jones Day and Taylor Wessing and then managing partner at Arc Pensions Law.
At the opening of 2025, alongside Nick Cheshire, Temple Bright celebrates the addition of commercial, IP and technology lawyer Ben Chivers, who joins the firm from Travers Smith where he was a partner for 10 years.
