Manoj Vaghela

Experience

Manoj Vaghela is a well-known name in insurance and arbitration circles. He is a problem-solver and uses his skill and decades of experience to resolve commercial disputes.  He is recommended in many of the Legal Directories . Over three decades in practice, Manoj has developed a reputation for handling complex (re)insurance and coverage litigation, international and Bermuda-form arbitrations, and high-stakes commercial disputes involving financial lines and professional liability. His practice has combined city-firm litigation experience with specialist insurance market work, advising insurers, reinsurers, policyholders  and C- suite  executives across sectors including retail, hospitality, energy, construction and pharmaceuticals.

Manoj’s professional background includes senior partnership roles with major insurance-focused global law firms and traditional corporate city firms. He has helped well-known companies and their directors secure  favourable outcomes by utilising his market-facing (re)insurance expertise, his contacts  within the dispute resolution community and his dispute-resolution capability. He is  regularly instructed on "bet the company" mandates and recent instructions include pandemic-related business interruption litigation, shareholder litigation and directors’ and officers’ liability disputes.

In May 2026 Manoj joined Wordley Partnership, bringing his specialist insurance and disputes practice into the firm’s partner-led platform. Prior to that he was a partner with Clyde & Co, Kennedys, Pinsent Masons, and Charles Russell Speechlys where he led and managed substantial insurance and commercial litigation mandates. Throughout his career Manoj has both led and worked alongside multi-office, international teams on matters that required coordination across jurisdictions.

Specialism

Manoj’s has three core areas  of expertise: (1)  insurance law;  (2) shareholder litigation and directors' defence; and (3) international arbitration.

His insurance work covers a broad range of insurance lines and litigation types, including business interruption (BI) coverage, (re)insurance disputes, Bermuda-form arbitrations, directors’ and officers’ (D&O) liability, professional indemnity, CAR, DSU and related construction insurance, product recall and trade-credit claims. He regularly advises on complex policy interpretation issues, aggregation and occurrence arguments, indemnity calculations and recovery strategies for policyholders, insurers and reinsurers.

Manoj has particular expertise acting for large corporate policyholders and for insurers in precedent-setting BI matters arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, where questions of occurrence, aggregation and the interaction of government support with insured loss have been central.

His shareholder and directors' defence practice involves high-profile contentious mandates involving management liability and alleged wrongful trading claims, where he has represented directors and chaired defence strategies. By way of example, he  represented the Company Secretary in the decades-long Arcadia  West-African oil trade litigation and the Chairman in the seminal BHS wrongful trading claim.

His international arbitration and cross-border dispute resolution practice is best viewed within the context of the Bermuda-Form and other international insurance arbitrations he has led in the pharmaceutical, energy and industrial sectors. Manoj’s cases frequently involve coordination with counsel and experts across multiple jurisdictions, and he is experienced in managing multi-party procedural complexity, expert evidence and appeals in commercial courts.