Leisure & Hospitality

Our specialist lawyers solve challenges for businesses across the leisure and hospitality sector.

Our expert solicitors provide the full range of legal services to companies operating across the UK’s leisure and hospitality industry, including pub groups, restaurant groups, hotels, amusement parks, casinos and cinemas.

Facing rising costs, changing consumer behaviours, the cost-of-living crisis, staff recruitment issues and sustainability challenges, leisure and hospitality businesses are under pressure from all angles. For some, however, this brings opportunities.

Meeting these challenges head-on — whether by controlling costs, dealing with regulation, considering expansion or protecting your reputation and brand — is an unavoidable reality. With so much change afoot, you need a trusted legal partner that understands the landscape and has a track record of achieving results.

A full-service law firm, our multi-award-winning team boasts preeminent experts in regulatory and compliance, real estate, employment law and intellectual property.

Whether you operate a pub company, brewery, hotel, restaurant group or another type of leisure business, our leisure and hospitality solicitors can help you to address your key challenges now and prepare you for the road ahead with pragmatic, commercially-driven legal solutions.

The full range of legal services for leisure and hospitality

Regulatory — including food standards, health and safety, licensing, data breaches and business crime and compliance.
Real estate — including planning, property and construction, development, disputes and litigation, portfolio management and asset management.
Employment — including the day-to-day handling of employee issues, resolving disputes, exits and settlement agreements, right to work, immigration law and business immigration issues. Our dedicated team handles volume employment tribunal work and compliance issues, including those relating to national minimum wage and HMRC investigations.
Intellectual property — including trade marks and protecting your brand and reputation.
Commercial—including trading agreements, terms and conditions, cyber security and data protection.
Corporate — including deal restructuring and mergers and acquisitions.

Talk to us

Sector specialist solicitors, on your side

Our leisure and hospitality sector team is headed up by Lee Jefcott, an employment lawyer with deep expertise in representing prominent employers and multi-site hospitality operators.

Our wider retail legal team is led by Helena Davies, a specialist property litigator with over two decades’ experience in acting for occupiers across the leisure and hospitality sector.

Your company’s legal strategy is in good hands with our multidisciplinary, multi-award-winning team. As well as having been ranked as the Best Law Firm to Work For in the UK, we're acknowledged in The Legal 500 and The Times’ Best Law Firms.

Meet the team

Allocation of tips webinar

The way that tips, gratuities and service charges are to be distributed to employees is set to change in a major shake-up for leisure and hospitality businesses.

Here, Lee Jefcott provide employers with a full overview of what they need to know.

Watch now

Case highlights

Pub business

Supporting with all people-related legal issues including dealing with volume employment tribunal cases.

National restaurant chain

Advising on national minimum wage (NMW) investigation involving uniform requirements for staff and successfully challenging HMRC’s position that there had been a TUPE transfer that made our client liable for historic NMW breaches and the accompanying ‘naming and shaming’.

National restaurant chain

Providing ongoing advice on immigration-related queries, including changes to right to work requirements to address post-Brexit immigration and advice on changes to eligibility criteria for skilled workers following the candidate shortage within the hospitality sector post-Covid, as well as the use of frontier worker permits.

Food safety and allergens

Providing representation in a case investigated by Trading Standards in which no further action was taken following written submissions being made at the outset of the case.

Multi-site operators

Advising on property estates including lease renewals and managing issues with landlords.