Pleased to hear that Barry Vitou and Danvers Baillieu, those tweet-crazy, social media levering, early-stage cheerleaders of the London tech scene have left wherever they were before and have moved to Pinsent Masons to play a leading role in their technology practice.
A few things set the pair apart:
- Their peculiarly hard to spell (for me anyway) French sounding surnames belie their status as true English gentlemen.
- They set up Bootlaw, the legal bootcamp for startups.
- They were some of the first lawyers I know to use Twitter and they are actually pretty good at it. (In fact the pair are such a double act that they even seem to have about the same number of Twitter numbers):
@danversbaillieu
.
@bazv
.
We like Barry and Danvers and are excited about their move. It was only a matter of time before their enthusiasm for startups and early stage businesses was going to mean they would find a new home in a firm that had more corporate interest in the early stage technology space. Winston and Strawn are a class act but their expertise is primarily in working with much larger US corporates which must have been unbelievably tedious for two go-getting enthusiasts.
Congratulations Pinsent Masons on landing a couple of top guys who have made a lot of friends in the startup world. We look forward to seeing what they do next.