Philippa Shire
Consultant Solicitor - Commercial Property
About Philippa
Philippa is a UK-qualified lawyer with over twenty years’ international experience in private practice and in-house in both start-up and blue-chip environments. Expertise in real estate, construction, litigation, and alternative dispute resolution, commercial and legal project management with experience in sustainability, corporate governance, ethics, and compliance, and real estate finance.
Philippa works with Institutional landlords, corporate tenants, and landowners on strategic portfolio management, development work, alternative dispute resolution, mediation, due diligence, reporting, company reorganisations, sustainability, and ESG.
Philippa gives technically sound but also hands-on, pragmatic, and commercial advice that supports strategic management of real estate portfolios. Philippa has strong attention to detail and can process large amounts of information quickly, and is an effective manager of crisis situations. She negotiates fairly but assertively and partners with clients to make sure they achieve their commercial objectives.
Outside of work, Philippa is a visual artist and photographer, and she also enjoys being outside, all kinds of sports, and yoga.
Legal Specialisms
- Transactional Real Estate Law: Landlord and Tenant - Transactional Real Estate Law (English qualified and experience working throughout EMEA, particularly France, Germany, Spain, Italy), including lease negotiations, lease terminations, and group reorganisations, particularly in the retail, office, and distribution warehouse sectors.
- Construction and Design: Procurement and Contracting - Experience negotiating construction and design agreements (Master Agreements and Single Service Agreements) and associated commercial contracts. Also experience supporting major development work from acquisition through due diligence to practical completion and operation of the asset.
- Alternative Dispute Resolution - With a background in Real Estate Litigation, she has experience both in private practice and in-house in alternative dispute resolution, particularly mediation.
- ESG and Sustainability - Green lease expertise, knowledge of ESG benchmarking and assessment, and the EU Green Deal landscape, including EU Taxonomy, CSRD, and SFDR. She is knowledgeable about the operation of green building certification schemes, including BREEAM and LEED.
- Real Estate Project Management - Strategic management and governance of multi-national corporate reorganisations, large-scale development projects, disposals, and terminations on insolvency.
Legal Expertise in Practice
- Development work - Led a team of three legal professionals managing two major development projects running in parallel. Supported the governance and approval process for the deals. Set up legal support, including external counsel budgets, project timetables, and project management systems. Negotiated lease documents containing 30-year commitments for a flagship premises with a rent of +GBP 9 million/year. Worked as a leader in a cross-functional team including design, construction, and procurement professionals.
- COVID-19 response - Led the company’s COVID-19 response, including strategic advice on rent payments and rent relief. Led a team that understood due diligence across a global retail fleet of +1,000 retail store leases and advised on the legal position on topics like Force Majeure across 26 jurisdictions. Led the work to future-proof the leased portfolio against future mandatory shutdowns of retail and office spaces.
- Russia/Ukraine conflict response - Strategic advice for managing the Russian retail fleet of a large corporate tenant. She was called in at the beginning of strategic discussions to do a risk assessment and to navigate the lowest risk exit possible from the Russian retail fleet. Led the due diligence exercise to map risks. Designed an exit strategy and put in place template documents, project management systems, and processes to manage the project as efficiently as possible. The company managed to exit from its entire Russian retail fleet with zero litigation.
- Green Leases - Managed a project to update standard lease clauses to reflect best practices in green leases. The objective was a fair balance between landlord/tenant obligations and the sharing of data to allow for accurate and useful ESG data collection and monitoring.
Related Services
Call Philippa: 31 625 194 210
Email Philippa:
p.shire@woodstocklegalservices.co.uk