Food, Leisure & Hospitality

Tailor-made advice across a wide spectrum

A "friendly and efficient group with a good grasp of the Scottish market and the Scottish licensed trade" and "Efficient, user friendly and pragmatic during moments of uncertainty" says Chambers Guide to the Legal Professions 2010, together with commenting that we offer a full-service approach to licensing, catering to a client base that includes some of the industry's biggest names.

The Food, Leisure & Hospitality team provides specialist legal advice to the drinks and leisure sector. Our advice is tailor-made across a wide spectrum of activities and incorporates a number of related areas of law including licensing, real estate, employment, corporate, banking and debt recovery.

We are recognised as leading individuals in one of the UK's leading independent legal directories, Chambers Guide to the Legal Profession, together with two of our key members, Andrew Hunter and Rod McKenzie, being named as leading individuals in Licensing.

We represent significant players. We continue to represent a wide cross-section of significant operators in the licensed trade in Scotland. Our clients include major multiple operators such as S&N Pub Enterprises, Belhaven Brewery Company Limited and BP Oil UK Limited. We also represent individual operators with our continued assistance to the members of the Scottish Licensed Trade Association (SLTA).

We have recently completed a large volume of applications under the Licensing (Scotland) Act 2005 as our clients moved from the "old regime" under the 1976 Act. As a result of our growing expertise in this area, we continue to be instructed by a wide variety of our clients, as they face new challenges under the 2005 Act.