Hospitality & Leisure

We have experience in all facets of the acquisition, finance and development of hospitality and leisure properties. This includes corporate transactions, real estate transactions, and construction and development agreements, including planning and regulatory compliance.

We identify the optimal ownership and financing structures for your projects and portfolios and help you implement these. We also advise on and implement the most advantageous domestic and international tax strategies for each structure. Our expertise includes the areas of equity investments, ground leases, joint ventures, construction financing, securitized financing, syndication financing, mezzanine financing and governmental financing.

Our team can provide you with tailored advice in areas such as debt and security restructuring; fixed charge property receivership; sales and purchases of insolvent businesses; and licensed trade insolvency.

We assist hospitality and leisure clients with highly charged issues specific to public finance such as structuring project financing involving governmental funds, obtaining and maximizing the impact of public funds, procurement regulations, leveraging private investment and reducing borrowing costs.

Drawing on our global expertise and offices, we can help you structure and close the most complex of international transactions. Clients turn to us for advice on international and domestic tax issues; corporate law; environmental and energy law; international negotiations; working with regulators; and structuring payment of management, incentive, license and centralized services fees to legitimately minimize local taxation.

Our commercial team is able to deliver a full range of multijurisdictional services, including advice on the drafting and negotiation of management agreements, sponsorship, advertising, e-commerce and IT services agreements, as well as data protection and compliance, especially in relation to customer relationship management systems. We provide practical advice on intellectual property matters, including all aspects of brand protection from brand creation through to registration, promotion, exploitation and enforcement.

We provide practical and commercial advice to both franchisor and franchisee, on all the structural and transactional aspects of franchise operations. We also assist to clients in the drafting and negotiation of a wide range of management and service agreements.

Our alcohol, entertainment and food licensing team offer commercially-focused advice and extensive experience in the sector. We act for a number of hotel groups in relation to licensing matters and regularly advise on the licensing requirements for the sale of alcohol, late night food sales and regulated entertainment, appear at contested hearings for license applications or reviews and advise on enforcement matters such as underage sales of alcohol.

We have a dedicated environmental, safety and health team, which specializes in advice on asbestos, carbon reduction, contaminated land, land remediation and all aspects of health and safety, offering incident support to clients on a 24/7 basis.

We have experience in advising on various aspects of food law including labelling, food safety, menu requirements and hygiene.

Our International Dispute Resolution team offers fast, authoritative and practical advice. Our team is well placed to offer early, cost-effective advice in all areas including specialist travel/ guest litigation.

We have a long history of advising clients in the hospitality and leisure sector. The vast majority of our clients have multisite operations, and frequently call upon our international network of employment and pension law experts.