Louis Doyle KC

Louis Doyle KC is a commercial silk with a particular reputation and experience in insolvency and company work and related financial litigation.

In the course of his insolvency practice Louis works on both the corporate and personal sides for office-holders, creditors (private and institutional) and other stakeholders, his cases commonly involving commercial claims litigated under the procedural umbrella of a formal insolvency. On the company and financial litigation side, he has very extensive experience in boardroom and shareholder litigation, financial disputes, including all forms of credit and security, guarantees, indemnities, letters of credit and negotiable instruments, bespoke funding and security arrangements and other financial instruments (including crypto, NFTs and other electronic coinage and the use of those tokens as security, fast developing areas in which he maintains a particular and wider interest). His practice regularly involves allegations of commercial fraud, acting for both claimants and defendants in roughly equal measure.

Louis has appeared in about fifty reported cases in his areas of interest. Since 1999 he has been named variously as a leading practitioner across insolvency/restructuring, commercial dispute resolution, and commercial chancery in both Chambers & Partners and the Legal 500. As one plaudit put it, “He is fantastic on his feet and has a very keen sense of how to pitch cases with judges and with opponents; he is well read, technically excellent and clients love him”.

Louis’s practice also regularly involves interim remedies, including injunctions, interim payments and summary judgment/striking out, director disqualification and public interest petition work (Attorney General panel member, 2001-2007).

Since taking silk, Louis’s practice features an increasing element of non-contentious drafting and related advisory work, including, as a natural function of the transaction avoidance work in which he has specialised for years in an insolvency context, the planning and structuring of high-value transactions, with particular reference to the susceptibility to challenge and the legal and commercial risks in such arrangements. The financial value of such assignments frequently requires bespoke insurance arrangements; the commercially sensitive nature of that work precludes more specific disclosure.

As a silk Louis has also been instructed by a variety of professionals and interested stakeholders (notably funders), in the insolvency and company law fields in which he specialized, seeking advice on the regulatory position. That work is invariably highly sensitive and has extended to the requirements and obligations imposed by a variety of bodies, including the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Insolvency Practitioners’ Association, the Bar Standards Board and the Financial Conduct Authority.

Since its first publication in 2005, Louis continues to co-author what is now Doyle, Keay & Curl’s Annotated Insolvency Legislation (12th edn, 2024, LexisNexis) (with Professor Andrew Keay and Joseph Curl KC of 9, Stone Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn (where Louis is also a door-tenant) with the support of a team of assistant contributors). Since 2010 he has been an editor of the leading looseleaf, Gore-Browne on Companies (LexisNexis). Over lockdown, Louis also established and now edits the bimonthly journal, Kings Insolvency. (To be added to Chambers’ free distribution database or to obtain past editions, simply email [email protected]). He has lectured widely to professional audiences on his areas of interest and has undertaken pro bono work regularly throughout his career at the Bar.

Louis has acted for clients from a very wide range of backgrounds, often in very challenging circumstances, assisted by what one plaudit refers to as his “remarkable emotional intelligence and ability to connect and communicate” with clients, other lawyers and judges. As a leader, he encourages team involvement and clear role delegation. Louis’s usual approach involves at an early stage the identification of a client’s aims and preferred outcomes in conjunction with an objectively realistic evaluation of merits and risk. His ethos is that a client’s valuable resources are most effectively applied in getting to the root of a problem and its solution, rather than the generation of an impressive but not necessarily relevant display of knowledge. Louis is enthusiastic in appropriate cases about mediation and ADR, of which he has extensive experience. He is also prepared to consider innovative funding ideas, having acted (successfully) on a number of Damages Based Agreements (DBAs) and DBAs “lite”.

Louis was born in Liverpool into a working-class family. He is married and has six children and two grandchildren. He qualified as a solicitor in 1994 before being called to the Bar in 1996 and joining what is now Kings Chambers in 1999 where he has been busy ever since with his ever-developing niche practice. For many years he served as an officer in the Army’s reserve parachute battalion. In 2017 he founded and headed up Kings Chambers Wellbeing. Outside of the Bar his non- executive involvement over the years in sectors including private healthcare provision, affordable housing and forestry has provided invaluable real-world insight and experience. In 2023 he accepted an invitation to join the advisory panel of an offshore litigation funder, a role in which he is primarily concerned with investment and placement of funds. His interests include fitness, music, literature, The Cormac McCarthy Society and Liverpool Football Club. In January 2023 he published an article in the Bar’s Counsel magazine on the nature and treatment of addiction, areas in which he maintains an ongoing interest.

Louis’s ongoing and recent work includes:

• Instructed by a London firm of solicitors, acting with a senior regulatory silk and specialist junior at Matrix Chambers on a Group Litigation Order by which thousands of claims (the underlying cause of action having been identified and formulated by Louis) are advanced against a number of banks arising out of the banks’ conduct in applying set-off in conjunction with proving for debts in a large number of insolvency cases.
• Advising on risks of FCA action or intervention in respect of the arrangement and funding/acquisition of IVA proposals.
• Advising and acting on the availability of the doctrine of merger as a sub-species of res judicata on the handing down of judgment and the framing of interim payment orders as final orders pending quantum trial.
• Resisting (successfully) attempts at striking out a s.994 petition on the grounds of defective disclosure (involving more than 2 million documents, hard copy and electronic) under an unless order.
• Advising the joint administrators (later liquidators) of two companies at the heart of a group (including 15 special purpose vehicles) involving Ponzi-scheme-type fraud under the front of property development scheme offering high equity and bond yields to members of the public. The liquidations involved five sets of insolvency proceedings (all settled) against former or related protagonists and the devising of a distribution plan for the treatment of recoveries and their distribution as dividends to creditors of both company creditors with court approval on applications for directions.
• High-value proceedings for a liquidator and a litigation funder in claims for unpaid share capital including claims under the Insolvency Act 1986 (including s.74 calls), s.33 of the Companies Act 2006, breach of fiduciary duty and breach of trust, estoppel (by share certificate and otherwise), mistake and rectification. (All settled before trial).
• Obtaining orders at very short notice the appointment of receivers over a firm of licensed insolvency practitioners under s.37 of the Senior Courts Act 1981.
• Successful Part 8 claim for rectification of company register of shareholders and consequential relief (including an award of indemnity costs given the out-of-the-norm conduct of the defendants through their high-profile commercial solicitors), leading almost immediately to a buy-out at a fair (and generous) value of the clients’ shares.
• Advising (and continuing to advise) Boris Becker in relation to his ongoing bankruptcy.
• Advising and drafting pleadings against various banks for variety of DISP contravention in the handling of large-scale redress claims. (All settled).
• Acting for and advising (with Steven Flynn, Kings Chambers’ sports law team) the offshore owner of a failed Football League club. Since appearing at the first hearing before the Sporting Sanctions Appeal Tribunal on behalf of the administrators of Wrexham Football Club in 2001, Louis has acted on the administrations of fourteen Football League clubs (including Leeds United, twice).
• (Cayman Islands) Acting for the liquidators of an investment feeder-fund now in dissolution in respect of very high value claims arising out of a high-profile failed Cayman investment trust (contractual and statutory construction, partnership law, estoppel and tracing).
• Acting for two of three respondents, leading Professor Andrew McGee, on the return date of a freezing and proprietary injunction obtained by the Financial Conduct Authority alleging fraudulent promotion and marketing of collective investment schemes. (Settled).
• (British Virgin Islands) Advising (separately) liquidators of two heavily insolvent BVI companies on the scope of the conflict of laws principle prohibiting in a domestic state the enforcement of a revenue debt of a foreign state.
• Acting for two of three defendants in High Court misfeasance proceedings pleaded at circa £68m which raised issues including: limitation; extensive argument as to the scope of the duties of a director/trustee, in particular as to the scope of s.172(3) of the Companies Act 2006; quantum of equitable compensation arising out of a company engaged in tax planning for sophisticated investors. Case settled successfully at mediation before fifteen-day trial.
• Acting for petitioners on an especially acrimonious and bitterly fought s.122(1)(g) Insolvency Act 1986 “just and equitable” winding-up petition involving interlinked and long-standing family businesses. Involves difficult evidential issues relating to recordings and the provenance of documents where allegations and cross allegations of forgery and convening of board and shareholder meetings.
• Acting for Indian creditors in the winding-up in the Isle of Man of a holding company in relation to disputed claims concerning issues of proof, subrogation and separate proceedings in the the Isle of Man and the Supreme Court of India, and substantial assets in those jurisdictions, Bosnia, the US and the BVI.