It is fitting that Joanna DeBiase is managing partner of IBB, because it is a certainty no one knows her firm better. A litigator who qualified in 1992 and joined IBB in 1999, she has held a plethora of roles at the firm, including head of technology and information services; compliance partner; deputy MLRO; COLP; and, most recently, operations director, before taking on the top job in May 2016. DeBiase is responsible for IBB’s strategic direction and has big plans. Most notably, IBB is targeting significant revenue growth, enough to take the currently sub-£20m west of London-headquartered firm comfortably into the top half of the UK 200, with a projected turnover of at least £30m.

Merger activity looks like a certainty, as are lateral hires and organic growth, along with a conversion to LLP status, all part of a modernising drive spearheaded by DeBiase. The new strategy will also see significant investment in technology and process efficiency.

DeBiase’s own journey has already been untypically wide-ranging, but the signs are she is only just getting started.

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Withers family partner Claire Blakemore has a thriving practice. What put her on this year’s Hot 100 list was her leadership and contribution in transforming Withers’ London office.

Following her promotion to the London managing director role at the end of 2016, one of her major projects was the office move – a two-year process. Blakemore saw the move as a good opportunity to transform the way teams and colleagues interact and collaborate with each other, instead of a straightforward change of premises.

With significant investment in an entire new IT system, Withers’ open-plan office design puts agile and flexible working at the heart of everything. As a result, teams from different practices can easily work together on complex matters. To promote transparency and team spirit, the new premises have abolished private offices for partners or senior management, who now sit at the same desks as other lawyers and staff.

Blakemore expects IT and technologies to continue to be at the forefront of Withers’ leadership team’s focus in 2019. She vows to make sure the next phase of the technology advancement will support better connection among all members of the firm.

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There cannot have been many blank spaces on Farmida Bi’s calendar last year. After a long career within the transactional practice at NRF, Bi took over as its first female chairman of EMEA last May. From then on, it has been a whistle-stop waltz for Bi around every one of the firm’s offices in that region. She has been meeting with whole offices, discussing the priorities and direction of the firm, as well as visiting international clients and attending pitches. Within the role, she also chairs a number of the firm’s committees, such as the promotions and partnership ones.

For Bi, understanding how the firm works as a business has been a fascinating and unusual journey. Alongside learning the ropes as chairman, she has been continuing her partner work within NRF’s transactional practice, pioneering work in Islamic finance, as well as debt capital markets and trustee work. Her clients are composed of big banks, corporates and sovereigns, including Citi, Deutsche Bank and Intertrust.

Over the past year, she has acted for Citibank on 13 solar power projects in Egypt, as part of an IFC-led consortium, and advised on project bonds to finance student accommodation at the University of Essex.

Bi worked for the government of Pakistan on its first-ever Eurobond when just a two-year qualified associate; this year she advised on the $2.5bn (£1.97bn) sukuk and Eurobond for the Republic of Pakistan.

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Michael Bates has already come to wide notice as a banking dealmaker and latterly managing partner of Clifford Chance’s London office. However, his inclusion in the Hot 100 recognises his imaginative leadership of two important projects for the global firm: the acquisition of Carillion’s legal operations hub in Newcastle, and the agenda-setting approach to gender pay gap reporting.

Bates was just one month into his tenure as London managing partner when the firm first decided it was interested in Carillion’s service centre. Within 13 days, the entire deal – which saw the transfer of 60 people – had been fully signed, signalling a new market for operations business acquisitions in the legal sector and a heating up of talent wars in the North East.

Bates also made his presence felt in the gender pay gap debate that consumed so much of 2018; under his stewardship, Clifford Chance was the first magic circle law firm to break ranks and disclose partner pay differentials, a move that was not to the firm’s specific PR benefit but that influenced the level of transparency around the issue.

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Called in 2007, Amy Rogers has built up a reputation as one of the most sought-after juniors at the Bar for complex commercial litigation. She has been acting for Iranian bank Mellat in a decade-long legal battle over sanctions imposed by the Treasury in 2009.

The bank successfully claimed in the Supreme Court that the sanctions were unlawful and is seeking damages of $4bn (£3.2bn) – the largest claim made against HM Treasury. The case is relisted for 2019 to determine damages.

In an equally long-running and high-profile case, Rogers won for a group of former AIG employees over breach-of-contract claims in relation to £100m of unpaid bonuses following the bailout of AIG in 2008. The damages trial is also set for 2019. Other highlights of Rogers’ work in 2018 included acting for Deliveroo to determine if it should be required to recognise a trade union, and the group litigation against the Government in the solar PV sector.

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The Criminal Bar is an immensely difficult place to be practising and in 2018 that fact was crystallised as the Criminal Bar Association (CBA) fought to secure a funding deal from the Ministry of Justice. As head of the organisation, Red Lion Chambers’ Angela Rafferty QC was integral to securing this funding and offering guidance, leadership and counsel to all those affected by the cuts.

Just over half of the CBA’s membership voted in favour of accepting the £15m in funding, though Rafferty acknowledged an air of “anger and disillusionment”. Sources from around the Criminal Bar threw their support behind Rafferty, acknowledging her work had secured the best deal possible.

While Rafferty continues her hard work to ensure those practising are remunerated fairly, it remains one of the most underfunded practices. The CBA’s fight for funding goes on and she will do everything she can to ensure a successful outcome for those represented.

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A hugely successful year for Maitland Chambers silk Christopher Pymont QC saw him win big for one Russian oligarch client, win the mandate for another and even have time to influence the rewriting of the test on criminal dishonesty.

The year began with a major victory for his client, Genting Casinos, after it alleged that the claimant in the case had cheated. As a result of the successful outcome, the test for dishonesty was changed from a two-step process to a one-step one, streamlining the whole procedure.

Pymont then took this momentum into one of the year’s biggest cases which saw Oleg Deripaska up against former business partners Vladimir Potanin and Roman Abramovich over the latter’s role as a ‘White Knight’ in mining company Rusal. The $1.5bn (£1.18bn) case is set to go to the Court of Appeal in 2019, while another Russian case sees him acting for Vitaly Orlov as he defends a claim from Alexander Tugushev over a third of his fishing business.

If he can carry on the momentum gained over the course of the past 12 months, more victories will be sure to follow.

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Anya Proops QC stands at the vanguard of the newest legal frontier – privacy rights. As data protection has become a top corporate priority, Proops has acted on a number of substantial and high-profile breach cases. Much of her work is occupied by a very pertinent question – who is legally responsible when data protection goes wrong?

In the first data leak class action in the UK, Proops acted for Morrisons after a former senior internal auditor at the supermarket’s Bradford headquarters leaked the payroll data of around 100,000 employees. She is also involved in the biggest data privacy case to date, acting for Facebook in its appeal against the £500,000 penalty issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office, in connection with the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Such cases can involve millions of individuals and the new legislation has the potential to sink organisations that fail to respect data privacy rights via huge fines.

As the world continues to debate how far we want to go in making privacy rights paramount, Proops is preparing for the many cases that lie ahead.

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When Thomas Plewman arrived at Brick Court 10 years ago, he had to build his UK practice from scratch. Already a successful practitioner in South Africa, particularly on auditor-related litigation, Plewman was called to the Bar in England in 2009 and took silk in 2016. His star has continued to rise in the past two years with a series of high-profile cases, including successfully acting for the Candy brothers in the £132m damages action brought by Mark Holyoake; for Goldman Sachs in the Supreme Court against Novo Banco on a jurisdiction claim; and for the head leaseholder of the Olympic Stadium, E20, in a case against West Ham United, which settled on day one of the trial, in which Plewman appeared in the first ever live-streamed hearing at the Court of Appeal. Plewman rounded off the year celebrating a major win in PrivatBank v Kolomoisky/Bogolyubov, a significant case for establishment of jurisdiction in which he appeared for the English defendants.

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As one of the most in-demand tax barristers on the circuit today, Jonathan Peacock QC is tackling some of the biggest disputes in the world. From representing a trio of BBC presenters on a dispute with the broadcasting entity that could lead to a deluge of cases, depending on the outcome, to cross-border issues extending as far as the Mauritius, Peacock has been an incredibly busy lawyer.

Major international tech giants have been under enormous scrutiny for their tax structures and this, says Peacock, will only increase in 2019. Will the pressure on the tech giants cause them to abandon markets or simply reorganise? Whatever that final decision may be, Peacock will have a significant say on the UK’s role in that argument.

In the meantime, the flow of work shows no sign of slowing. The small, 10-barrister set remains a leader in this field and in Peacock it boasts one of the taxman’s most active adversaries.

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Michael Mylonas QC had 24 hours to secure the extraction and posthumous use of a fatally injured man’s sperm to allow the victim’s wife to become pregnant.

A day before the man died, Mylonas collaborated with the doctors involved and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to urgently submit an application to the Court of Protection, which hears cases related to people who – due to lack of mental capacity – cannot make decisions for themselves.

Showing how the couple was undergoing a fertility treatment and was keen to have a child, the barrister convinced the judge that it was the man’s will to enable his wife to conceive, and subsequently allowed for his sperm to be retrieved and stored through the signature of a deputy.

As part of his medical law practice, Mylonas has been working on a series of groundbreaking cases at the intersection of biology, ethics and law, often pushing regulatory boundaries and shaping the public debate. Next year, he will work on the regulatory void surrounding the case of a transgender man who wants to be recognised as father of his baby after a local registrar said he would be forced to be recorded as mother.

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Taking silk in 2011, Matrix Chambers’ Phillippa Kaufmann QC has developed a niche for herself acting on pivotal public law disputes against bodies such as the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Defence.

Switching over from Doughty Street Chambers to Matrix nearly five years ago, Kaufmann had expected to broaden her expertise and win instructions on a wider range of cases. However, the last 12 months shows she has well and truly carved a name for herself as the barrister on call for victims of well-known public institutions.

Last year, she built on her expertise as a prison lawyer by taking on the Metropolitan Police in the highly publicised battle between the organisation and victims of London cab driver John Worboys. The victims claimed their treatment by the police caused them mental harm and alleged that they had failed to conduct an effective investigation into his crimes. The Met’s appeal was dismissed in an important decision over whether victims of serious crime can sue the police for errors. Kaufmann then took on the Parole Board, marking the first time it had ever been challenged, and forced to reverse, a decision to release a prisoner.

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Last year, Jeremy Hyam QC of 1 Crown Office Row (1COR) took on a slew of cases that attracted considerable press attention, including the inquest into the death of Natasha Ednan-Laperouse, the 15-year-old girl who died after consuming a Pret baguette with sesame in it. This attracted the sort of media storm that put all involved under immense pressure, raising the emotional temperature in already sensitive circumstances.

One day the case was relatively unknown; the next Sky News was on 1COR’s doorstep. The case culminated in the legal team meeting Pret’s chief executive to make sure something good would come from the tragedy: proper labelling on all products.

Hyam has also been at the centre of a well-covered debate about the ethics surrounding IVF, where he defended an IVF clinic from a man attempting to claim damages for a ‘forged’ consent form.

Hyam is used to working in the public eye, having earned silk through cases such as the Mid Staffs hospital scandal, an important case relating to clinical negligence.

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Fraud and banking junior Louise Hutton’s practice has gone on to another level since she joined Essex Court Chambers from Maitland Chambers in May 2018, a move that has given her more exposure to top-level banking, insolvency and civil fraud matters.

Hutton had already made a name for herself with her successful involvement in the long-running and various Lehman Waterfall litigations (the Supreme Court judgment in Waterfall 1 was handed down in May 2017 after five years of litigation).

She was led by David Foxton QC on the Maroil fraud case, which included a disputed freezing order and settled in the summer of 2017. Her current instructions include the high-profile arbitration over PrivatBank’s bonds brought by Madison Pacific, in which she is instructed with Vernon Flynn QC by Adam Silver at Dechert, and the Gaiduk v Taruta fraud claim, listed for an eight-week trial in the Commercial Court in the autumn. With a basket of contentious trust cases also on the go, an area that meshes well with civil fraud, Hutton’s 2019 looks set to be anything but quiet.

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In March 2018, Matthew Hill was at a children’s party handing out the jelly when he got an urgent call from the Home Office. Could he come in urgently? They could not say why.

It transpired that Hill’s assistance was needed in relation to the Salisbury nerve agent attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal. The pair were in comas and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons wanted to take blood samples.

Because it was for evidential rather than medical purposes, the hospital wanted a court order and Hill and James Eadie QC (now Sir James) spent an incredibly intense five days working on an unusual application with no real precedent.

The cases Hill works on are literally always in the news. He is junior counsel on the ongoing infected blood inquiry (see his fellow Hot 100 member Des Collins) and represented the London Ambulance Service at inquests into the deaths of victims of the Westminster Bridge terror attack.

Also coming up this year is work on one strand of the child sex abuse inquiry and the Birmingham pub bombings – an interesting case legally to take to the Court of Appeal because it is about what an inquest should and should not do.

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3VB’s Christopher Harris QC, who was elevated to silk at the start of 2019, has carved out a strong reputation in investor-state arbitration and the enforcement of treaty awards.

He spent much of 2018 leading on substantial investment treaty claims against Bulgaria, Poland, Azerbaijan, Nigeria and Sri Lanka. Two cases have involved significant submissions on the impact of the Court of Justice of the European Union’s Achmea judgment, which sent shockwaves through the arbitration community in March last year.

Harris has also been involved in the groundbreaking enforcement proceedings in the High Court and Court of Appeal in the Stati v Kazakhstan case, successfully defending enforcement of the $500m (£395m) award and securing a rare determination that the award had been procured by Stati’s fraud on the tribunal.

While having extensive experience in representing states, such as Kazakhstan, Harris is also frequently instructed to act for corporate clients in investment treaty arbitration. For example, he is representing private equity heavyweight Carlyle Group in arbitration proceedings against Morocco in a $400m dispute over the profits it lost when the country’s only refinery went bankrupt.

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Though Emma Hargreaves was only called to the Bar six years ago, the reputation she has developed in that short time is superb.

The Serle Court barrister has carved out an unexpected niche as a specialist Chancery barrister, focusing on major divorce cases for high-net-worth individuals. Last year, she estimates her split of work was close to 50/50 Chancery to family, though 2019 might see the Chancery work dominate to become about three quarters of all her work.

Hargreaves’ work for hotel business Edwardian continues to take up a great deal of her time, with much of that centring on unfair prejudice petitions, while an ongoing case in Bermuda involving non-charitable trusts still rages on over five years since it began, with estimates saying the total value now runs into billions of dollars.

In line with her chambers’ ever-increasing focus on offshore work, the Caribbean will continue to be a fruitful area for Hargreaves as the future looks ever more promising.

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Though he has made a career for himself as a health lawyer on the side of the practitioners, it was an issue far closer to home for 1 Crown Office Row’s Martin Forde QC that dominated the silk’s year.

Forde’s work in 2018 focused heavily on the Windrush generation, taking on the role of independent adviser to the Windrush Compensation Scheme in May as he battled to reimburse those families who suffered over their immigration status.

With compensation potentially running into six figures for those damaged over scant travel documentation, Forde has had his work cut out. As an unexpected result of his efforts, the son of Windrush parents has even been granted silk in Barbados.

The Windrush work is unlikely to slow down in the near future. Indeed, it will only gather pace as public scorn continues to pour on the structures responsible for the mistreatment of those involved.

Forde will be very much at the sharp end of the charge to ensure that the Windrush generation gets its fair share.

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With over 30 years served at the construction Bar, Stephanie Barwise QC has plenty of experience in all manner of complex disputes. It was perhaps her work on the Ladbroke Grove rail crash inquiry 20 years ago that set her up to take on one of the biggest matters of our generation: she is providing the construction law expertise in a team representing victims in the Grenfell Tower public inquiry.

Much of Barwise’s work is not UK-based: she successfully represented the government of Trinidad last year and also sat as an ICC arbitrator on the Panama Canal case, which contained a number of unusual points. But Grenfell took up much of her time last year and will again in 2019. It will kick off in a major way once more in the autumn; before then, it should come as no surprise that Barwise is the sought-after silk for many other cladding-related matters.

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It is unprecedented for the Hot 100 to contain an anonymous figure. However, The Secret Barrister’s contribution to the legal profession last year deserves recognition. His or her book, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken, did an immense amount to bring the plight of British justice to wider public attention. Published in March 2018, it immediately shot into the bestseller lists. The Criminal Bar Association and Young Legal Aid Lawyers subsequently launched a successful fundraising campaign to ensure that every MP received a copy.

Having initially risen to prominence on Twitter, ‘SB’ remains prolific on that platform, politely and patiently explaining the law and justice system to the layperson and generally bringing enlightenment where there is ignorance.

Will The Secret Barrister’s messages be heeded by those who have the power to change things? Who knows? But what is certain is that the criminal Bar has a strong new defender advocating for it.

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