Ward Hadaway appoints Head of Corporate
12th November, 2025
We are pleased to confirm the appointment of corporate partner Nik Tunley as Head of Corporate following Ward Hadaway's merger with The Endeavour Partnership.
The move brings further strategic focus to Ward Hadaway’s national corporate capability across Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Teesside with further growth planned.
Nik specialises in mid-market mergers and acquisitions for owner-managed businesses and private equity investors. Having joined The Endeavour Partnership in 2008, he led its corporate team for over a decade before becoming its finance partner. Recent transactions under Nik’s leadership include the Growth Partner investment in Host & Stay, the sale of Arbtech to Inflexion-backed Celnor (shortlisted for North West Deal of the Year, £50m+) and Gi Group Holding’s acquisition of Encore Personnel in the UK.
Steven Petrie, Ward Hadaway’s Managing Partner, said: “Nik has grown and led high-performing teams for many years. As a corporate lawyer, he combines calm deal leadership with commercial judgement that clients value on mid-market M&A. As a leader, he embodies the firm’s values of straightforward, respectful and ambitious. His appointment underlines our commitment to further building our corporate reach and maintaining the momentum we’ve built since the merger.”
Under Nik’s leadership, the Ward Hadaway corporate team will continue to handle complex, multi-office transactions of all shapes and sizes, while progressing the firm’s growth plans, including expansion in Birmingham. His appointment follows a series of recent senior hires and promotions across the firm, including partner-level and specialist appointments.
Ward Hadaway’s corporate team is consistently recognised among the most active dealmakers outside London, ranking as one of the Top 10 firms nationally in the latest Experian MarketIQ league tables for completed M&A transactions across the UK.
Commenting on his appointment, Nik Tunley said: “We are a highly capable corporate team with genuine strength in depth across our offices. The merger has added further scale and specialist expertise. My focus is to keep standards high, knit the teams even more closely together across locations and deepen our relationships with the adviser community. Our combined forces have a shared reputation for giving clients straight answers and conducting well-run deals, whatever the complexity, and so we have an extremely strong base on which to further extend the team, and the work we are doing for clients.”
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