Tees Law appoints new Senior Partner
Tees Law, the major regional law firm with offices across Cambridgeshire, Essex and Hertfordshire, is delighted to announce that experienced Private Client lawyer Catherine Mowat has been appointed the firm’s new Senior Partner. Catherine becomes the eighth Senior Partner in the firm’s 108-year history and its first female Senior Partner. She succeeds to the position from David Redfern, who continues as a Consultant within the business and as Non-Executive Chairman of Trust Tees Ltd and Tees Financial Ltd.
Catherine is a true Tees stalwart, having joined in 1998 as a trainee in the Bishop’s Stortford office. Her training contract included working with former senior partners, Rodney Stock in the Commercial Property department and Richard Tee in the Private Client department. It was the Private client department where Catherine found her niche and where she has remained throughout her career to date.
Catherine qualified as a solicitor in 2000 and became a Partner in 2007, less than a decade after joining the firm. It was a particularly busy time for Catherine; between the years of 2005 and 2008, she juggled a full caseload alongside studying for an MBA in Legal Practice, before moving to the Cambridge office in 2009 and becoming Head of Office in 2010 leading the Cambridge office for the following four years.
Catherine has over 20 years’ experience in the Private Client field with particular expertise in complex estate administration and succession planning. Catherine advises regularly on wills, powers of attorney and succession planning for rural clients and high net worth individuals. She has also developed further expertise in multi-million-pound professional deputyships and regularly acts as professional deputy, executor, trustee and attorney. Since moving to the Cambridge office she has developed the Private Client Cambridge team from a skeleton staff to a highly skilled team of lawyers delivering a significantly increased, seven figure turnover.
In addition to her role as head of the Cambridge Private Client team, Catherine has been a Director of the firm’s main board Trust Tees Plc since 2018. She sits on the management team for the Private Client department across its six offices and on the leadership team of the Cambridge office.
Outside of work, Catherine resides locally to the Saffron Walden area. She has a great interest in music and sings in local choirs and serves as a trustee of a number of charities.
So, what does Catherine aim to bring to the Senior Partnership role?
“I consider it an enormous privilege and an exciting challenge to be taking on this responsibility,” she said.
“Tees may be a very different firm from the one I joined over two decades ago, but its core values still hold as true today as they did then. One of my main aims as Senior Partner, then, is to uphold the ‘essence of Tees’ – in other words, a commitment to empathetic, straightforward and communicative relationships with our clients, and collaborative working relationships with our colleagues.”
She continued, “In times of change, it is important to remain agile and embrace new ways of working as the world shifts and evolves. Never has this become more apparent than at the present time as we have navigated the business through the pandemic. Tees has demonstrated that it is not afraid to embrace change, with new technologies and hybrid working practices now firmly part of who we are. However, it is important to not become complacent, to recognise opportunities as and when they present themselves and see challenges as a way of striving to be better.”
Ashton Hunt, Group Managing Director at Tees, said: “I would first like to thank David Redfern for his unswerving leadership throughout his 38-year tenure at the helm of Tees, where he has dedicated his entire career. During that time, David’s vision for Tees, and his foresight of future managerial and technology changes, has resulted in Tees being the successful firm that it is today. We are delighted that David will be remaining with us as a Consultant and Non-Executive Chairman of Trust Tees Ltd and Tees Financial Ltd.”
“Catherine’s long and distinguished history with Tees more than qualifies her to take up the mantle, and I am confident that she will lead Tees to greater heights in the months and years ahead. I couldn’t be prouder of her and am hugely excited to see what the future will bring.”