Howard Watt, a venture capital lawyer with over 15 years’ experience in providing corporate and commercial advice to funds, investors, entrepreneurs, start-ups and high growth companies, has joined Fladgate.
Watt advises both funds and investee companies with deal experience that ranges from early/seed stage investments and spanning the full life cycle of Series A-D, through to M&A and IPO exits for venture-backed companies.
He is recognised in the latest Legal 500 and Chambers guides as a leading individual in his field. Watt also spent six years as in-house counsel to a major European growth venture fund and so has significant and hands-on experience from the both the fund and client side of transactions which act as a real differentiator for clients in this area.
Watt advises angels, founders, companies and many of the leading early stage and growth venture capital funds operating in Europe. His transaction history covers a wide variety of sectors including fintech, gaming, health tech, SaaS, ad-tech, AI, consumer tech, cryptocurrency and blockchain.
Seven new partners have already joined a range of practices at Fladgate in the last six months, with two promotions, totalling nine expert partners supporting the firm’s business strategy of accelerating its ability to provide a tailored and comprehensive range of solutions to some of the world’s leading and fastest growing businesses, investors and ‘trend initiator’ brands as well as HNWI’s, family offices and their advisors.
Watt says: “I’m tremendously excited to be joining Fladgate during this period of recent remarkable growth. With many of my clients requesting advice in areas such as fund formation, tax and options, FCA regulation, and private client, I am delighted to join a firm with the breadth and depth of experience to service those clients, and to be working alongside an expert team who have the same ‘partner-led’ approach that I share.”
Grant Gordon, Executive Partner at Fladgate, adds: “Howard Watt’s arrival is great news for the development of our highly differentiated legal services for clients in the venture capital and technology space. The firm is building out a breadth of carefully shaped services for both business and private clients that have fast moving, complex challenges and which require a mix of solutions delivered, importantly, by a highly personal service from their lawyers.”
With Howard joining, Fladgate’s wider corporate team now numbers 28 partners, delivering the full spectrum of services, advising start-up businesses to major private and listed companies and institutions. We help our clients to realise their objectives, whether that means raising finance, expanding through merger, acquisition or joint venture, divesting businesses, IPO’ing or launching in the UK.
