Norton Rose corporate partner Thierry Leleu has resigned from the firm’s Paris office to become managing director of a top European real estate investment fund.

The move to a senior non-legal role – understood to be at Orion European Real Estate Fund -comes just 18 months after Leleu joined the firm with three of his assistants from the Paris office of Mayer Brown & Platt, the Chicago-based firm that merged with London’s Rowe & Maw this year.