Malcolm Niekirk

Frettens’ resident ‘Insolvency Guru’ is a force of nature in Insolvency with three decades of experience and is regarded as one of the leading practitioners on the south coast.  Malcolm is head of the firm’s Insolvency & Restructuring team, a role in which he works closely with the other commercial teams.

Work

Malcolm Niekirk is a registered Insolvency practitioner as well as a solicitor and joined the firm in 2020 as Partner, to head up the Insolvency and Restructuring team.

Malcolm has been recognised in the 2023 Legal 500 which is an independent legal directory.

He passed JIEB more than twenty years ago to qualify as a licenced insolvency practitioner, but with the firm intention of never taking a formal appointment.

Having spent time as a practising solicitor and partner, heading the insolvency teams at two large regional firms, he then set up his own consultancy in 2016. He spent four years working as a consultant with law firms and insolvency practitioners as the ‘Insolvency Guru’ keeping insolvency practitioners out of trouble, offering advice on specific cases and generally.

In addition to that, he was also a director at Peter Hall from 2017, getting first-hand experience in a boutique restructuring and insolvency practice.

What Malcolm does

Malcolm offers technical advice, drafts documents, negotiates, and helps sell stuff. As a leading practitioner in the field, he regularly lectures and is an occasional conference speaker. He sometimes represents others - creditors, company directors and debtors - involved in the insolvency process.

He also is taking appointments as an independent Evaluator.  (From 2021, it is a legal requirement on directors buying back their own company’s business through an administration pre-pack that they need to commission an independent report from an experienced insolvency professional in many cases.

Here is a link to some Independent Evaluation FAQs

At Frettens, Malcolm hosts monthly Coffee Break Briefing sessions for Insolvency Professionals and other law firms, looking at relevant insolvency topics and discussing them in a 30 minute presentation.  These have become extremely well-attended, regularly drawing over 100 attendees.

You can follow Malcolm on Mastodon, where he posts timely insolvency updates.

Experience

• Advising administrators on the sale of businesses and other assets.
• Technical advice on structuring and effecting s110 solvent reconstructions.
• Advice on antecedent transactions and asset recovery in formal corporate and personal appointments.
• Technical advice on legal issues arising in insolvencies.

Play

You will find Malcolm in a field or two over the summer watching bands at music festivals. Malcolm is also a keen photographer and sometimes manages to combine both interests by photographing live music. He is also a qualified humanist celebrant so sometimes presides over a naming ceremony or a wedding at weekends.