James is a Partner in Reed Smith's Europe & Middle East Corporate Group, based in London. James focuses on a broad range of corporate finance and company/commercial transactions, including cross-border and domestic mergers and acquisitions, alliances, joint ventures and equity issues for public and private clients and dealing with commercial contracts and related work, particularly for clients in the media and technology, energy and natural resources and real estate sectors. James is part of the UK Equity Capital Markets practice and has been involved with numerous equity issues for domestic and international companies in the UK. In particular, he has been involved in new and secondary issues on AIM, the junior market of the London Stock Exchange, since its inception in 1995. James has considerable experience of advising overseas companies seeking to raise equity capital and a listing in London. James has particular experience of working with Chinese companies coming to London and has spoken at conferences on the subject. James works closely with several significant clients of the firm's Real Estate Group on corporate transactions, including sales and acquisitions of corporate vehicles and unit trusts, fund formation, joint ventures and partnerships. James has worked on a number of significant transactions, involving clients from Kazakhstan. James leads Reed Smith's transactional capability in the Astana office.
Matt is a Counsel in Reed Smith’s private funds group. His practice covers a wide range of transactional and investment work, including the formation, operation and restructuring of private funds (across the private equity, tangible asset, credit and real estate sectors), indirect investments, secondary sales, joint ventures, and managed accounts. Matt advises pension schemes and state plans, institutional investors, and family offices on their managed account and fund investments across the range of investment sectors in Europe, China and India. Matt is also a member of Reed Smith’s private equity real estate team and advises investors and operators in respect of all aspects of indirect investments in real estate including multi-jurisdictional acquisitions and disposals, joint ventures and co-ownership structures, and asset management arrangements. Matt has spent time on secondment to the physical commodities division of Nomura International and the asset finance team at Barclays Bank. He also spent six months working in Reed Smith’s Hong Kong office.