Winckworth Sherwood has made a series of promotions to partner in its real estate, social housing finance and education teams, strengthening its existing offering for clients. The new partners are Aida Smajlovic, Elizabeth Pipe, Lucy Grimwood and Shree Hindocha. This brings the total number of partners in the firm to 72, with an even split between male and female.
Lucy Grimwood is an experienced finance lawyer, working across social housing finance and joint ventures. Having joined the firm eight years ago, she acts for a wide range of clients ranging from registered providers, developers, banks, funds and corporate borrowers. Her promotion will strengthen the firm’s social housing finance practice as the sector faces increasing scrutiny and challenges around ESG reporting requirements.
Reflecting the firm’s strong pipeline of development work from new and existing clients, Shree Hindocha and Elizabeth Pipe have been promoted to partner in the real estate team. With over 15 years’ experience, Shree specialises in site acquisition for residential property development. She regularly acts on major developments and regeneration schemes on behalf of national house builders.
Shree’s skills complement those of Elizabeth, who specialises in regeneration projects, and the acquisition of residential and mixed-use developments acting for national house builders together with forward funded bulk disposals to PRS operators and providers of affordable housing. She first joined Winckworth Sherwood as a trainee solicitor in 2010.
In the firm’s education practice, Aida Smajlovic heads up the Schools HR team. Aida’s specialism is in employment law for the sector, acting for maintained schools and academy trust companies as well as dioceses and independent schools. Her promotion reflects an increase in education providers seeking high level employment advice often in challenging circumstances from an experienced team with a comprehensive understanding of the sector.
Jo Keddie, Senior Partner at Winckworth Sherwood, commented: “These new partnerships reflect the exceptional contribution that Aida, Elizabeth, Lucy and Shree make to important areas of our business – advising clients within real estate, social housing finance and education. Their well-deserved advancements to partner support our firm by strengthening teams where we are seeing significant growth opportunities, enabling us to bolster our offering to existing and new clients.”