We are delighted to announce the expansion of our professional discipline and regulatory team, with the appointment of leading professional discipline and regulatory specialist Nick Leale as Partner, and the launch of our dedicated full-service Regulatory Unit. Nick joins Lead Partner Andrew Pavlovic, and partners Corinne Staves and Beth Hale, in further expanding our firm’s capabilities in providing regulatory and professional discipline advice to law and accountancy firms, alongside other professional sectors.
Nick Leale brings nearly two decades of senior leadership experience in regulatory and professional conduct law. His career highlights include advising regulators and professionals across sectors such as legal, healthcare, accountancy, education, engineering, charities, and sports.
Clare Murray, Managing Partner of CM Murray LLP, said: “Nick’s appointment, and the launch of our full-service Regulatory Unit, reflects the integral role of this specialisation within our firm and places it at the heart of what we do for our clients. We are confident that Nick’s expertise gives us a great opportunity to expand our offering to continue to provide clients with a market-leading, integrated service for all things regulatory.
“We have found that most of our partnership investigations, mergers, international structuring, and partnership disputes work, for both firms and individuals, involves a professional conduct or regulatory aspect. As a result, we started to develop our own in-house capability a few years ago under the excellent leadership of Andrew Pavlovic, which has been a huge success. We can now provide seamless and integrated specialist partnership, employment and regulatory advice, as well as a suite of regulatory and partner training, thanks to the outstanding work by Andrew Pavlovic and also Corinne Staves, working closely with our employment and partnership law partner Beth Hale and our Senior Partner, Sarah Chilton. This is a tremendous collaboration between those market leading partners.
“Now felt like the right time to take the next step with the launch of a formal specialist contentious and non-contentious Regulatory Unit building on those foundations so successfully established by Andrew. Nick has a phenomenal track record leading one of the largest and most successful regulatory teams in the UK. His experience and leadership will play a pivotal role in helping us address the increasingly complex challenges faced by law and accountancy firms.”
Nick is also a dual qualified solicitor and barrister and highly experienced professional regulatory advocate, having represented numerous regulators and professionals in complex interim and substantive hearings in the legal, healthcare and accountancy sectors. For several years Nick acted as a prosecutor and advocate for the SRA before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.
Previously, Nick spent 18 years at Blake Morgan where he led the firm’s Tier 1 Professional Conduct team from 2010 and its 60-strong regulatory group from 2021. In 2012, he was personally appointed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to prosecute the full range of disciplinary cases before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT). In 2023, Nick joined the London office of AmLaw 200 firm Armstrong Teasdale as its European General Counsel and Head of Legal Practice, later becoming its London managing partner.
Beyond his legal industry roles, Nick has held significant appointments in the regulatory field. Since 2016, he has served as a Legal Chair on the Football Association’s National Serious Case Panel, adjudicating on cases involving discrimination, serious misconduct, and the Football Association’s first ground closure sanctions. In 2024, he was appointed as a Legal Assessor both to the conduct panels of the General Pharmaceutical Council and the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy.
CM Murray Regulatory Unit:
At CM Murray LLP, our full-service Regulatory Unit is dedicated to providing top-tier regulatory and professional discipline advice to firms and individuals in the legal, accountancy and other sectors. Find out more here.
Our team, made up of Partners Andrew Pavlovic, Nick Leale, Corinne Staves, and Beth Hale, provides specialist, integrated advice across a range of contentious and non-contentious matters, including:
