“Its commitment to customer service and the need for timely and sometimes robust advice is highly valued.”
Legal 500“Extremely thorough and clearly experts in the field of Charity and governance”
Muslim Council of Britain“LBMW has continued to provide the excellent service my family has always enjoyed”
“In a complex and challenging case, your performance was exemplary”
“A professional team that provided commercial and user-friendly advice and got the deal done for us”
“The lawyers are experts in their field and they provide comprehensive advice. They have good communication skills and quick response times along with availability”
Legal 500"LBMW provides a wide spectrum of services without diluting the in-depth expertise of any particular area."
Legal 500
"[...] a one-stop-shop for all legal services where seamless communication and referrals between areas of expertise and partners allow for all aspects of one’s needs to be met."
Legal 500
"LBMW excels at maintaining relationships by instilling confidence through the quality of its work and advice which is thorough, timely, well reasoned and comprehensive."
Legal 500
Shameela Ahmed
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.