Kate Hammond wins 2020 Family Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year Award

There has been some wonderful news this morning – managing partner Kate Hammond has won the Family Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year (LALY) award.

The coveted award, sponsored by Resolution, was presented at the first LALY awards held online and hailed as the most inclusive LALY awards yet.

Kate was praised for being a brilliant role model to everyone, from young lawyers just starting out in their career to her senior management team and colleagues at Miles & Partners Solicitors in London.

She is a recognised specialist in child care law and her work involves local authority care proceedings where she acts for parents, children, and guardians. Her successes last year include securing an FGM protection order for a ten-year-old girl in a case where the judge said, ‘it was hard to imagine a child being at higher risk of female genital mutilation.’

You can watch Kate receiving her award on the video below, or click here.

‘I think it’s a really tough job being a legal aid lawyer,’ said Kate on receiving her award. ‘Whatever area of law you work in, I think the young people who are committing to doing this work are just amazing. If I can encourage and inspire them a bit, then I am thrilled to do so.’

When asked about how the coronavirus pandemic had affected her work, Kate explained about how remote hearings have posed their own challenges:

‘I have been doing remote hearings by Microsoft Teams and it is challenging. There are difficulties with hearing people, not being able to be seen, or their wi-fi drops out and it makes access to justice quite tricky. We conduct more hybrid hearings now where the most vulnerable people are physically attending court, which I think is better as at least then they have immediate access to their representatives.’

You can find out more about some of the landmark cases Kate has worked on by visiting her profile here.

Resolution national chair Juliet Harvey says: ‘Kate is clearly a brilliant role model who is inspiring the next generation of legal aid lawyers to continue this incredibly important work.’

If you missed it, you can watch the awards night in full by clicking here.

The contents of this article are for the purposes of general awareness only. They do not purport to constitute legal or professional advice. The law may have changed since this article was published. Readers should not act on the basis of the information included and should take appropriate professional advice upon their own particular circumstances.