- Quality Service Putting our clients first and understanding their challenges, objectives and goals and delivering a tailored service that represents value in every sense.
- Heritage Taking pride in our history, embracing our legacy and taking responsibility for the future success of our firm.
- Forward Thinking Striving to be flexible, skilled, able to adapt to the needs of our clients and always thinking several steps ahead.
- Expertise To pursue the delivery of outstanding results in all we do and to be market leaders in our specialist sectors.
- Dynamic To be positive in attitude, energetic, responsive and always on the front foot.
Shameela Ahmed
Partner and Head of Family Law
Shameela has been specialising in family law for close to 20 years. She has a wealth of experience in dealing with multi-value, complex financial claims and private disputes over children.
Shameela took a special interest in family law during her studies and specialised in family law in both her undergraduate degree and postgraduate degree where she specialised in international family law and child law (with an emphasis on assisted reproduction, adoption and surrogacy).
Experience
Throughout her career Shameela has worked extensively on financial settlements, jurisdictional issues, pre and post nuptial agreements, variation of maintenance applications, enforcement of orders, appeals, child abduction and national and international relocation of children. She has also acted for unmarried and same sex couples and assisted them with financial and property claims. She has acted for a variety of individuals from professionals to business entrepreneurs and celebrities.
Leo Tolstoy, a famous author wrote “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Shameela offers a bespoke and holistic service to her clients as she recognises that family breakdown can be one of the most challenging events in an individual’s life. She believes every case is different and she prides herself in providing a bespoke legal solution for her clients and the objectives they would like to achieve.
Shameela has built a reputation as a personable and pragmatic lawyer with an extensive range of technical expertise. She regularly provides comment on family law issues for various media publications and radio.
Some examples of her varied practice include: -
- Acting for a British Mother who escaped from Dubai with her children who were all born in the UAE and successfully opposed the the Father’s application for an order for contact and return to the UAE and thereby protecting the Mother from any claims of abduction.
- Acting for a same sex married couple where one husband was from the USA and the other from the UK who had adopted two boys from the USA. On the breakdown of the marriage Shameela negotiated a financial settlement for the husband moving back to the USA with the children.
- Acting for a high net worth couple (husband) where the husband moved to the USA and the wife remained in London negotiating cross jurisdictional child maintenance issues and school fee orders.
- Acting for a high-net-worth husband the subject of confiscations proceedings and successfully navigating the criminal and civil aspects of the dispute.
- Acting in a number of complex children proceedings ranging from coercive controlling conduct to allegations of abuse. Shameela has also dealt with cases in which orders applied for include a religious and/or cultural relevance and she regularly deals with international aspects of the removal of children to a different jurisdiction.
- Acting for television personalities and other high-profile individuals in financial/children’s proceedings whilst protecting their identity and confidentiality.
Career to date
Before joining Lee Bolton Monier Williams Shameela trained with a Legal 500 firm and then headed up a family department in the Essex/London borders before returning to firms in the City and West End.