Practice Areas
Lucy is a leading KC specialising in construction, engineering, energy and shipbuilding. She is frequently instructed in high value and high profile litigation and arbitration in relation to major infrastructure projects, including PFI/PPP, and energy projects from oil and gas to windfarms to nuclear. Her practice includes claims for and against construction professionals in these sectors and project-related issues such as insurance, bonds and guarantees. She is also instructed in relation to multiple Building Safety Act matters.
Her impressive specialist practice has a particular focus on large projects involving complex factual, technical and contractual disputes. Lucy appears regularly in the English courts including at appellate level and in international arbitration globally. Her extensive international experience includes all major institutional rules and ad-hoc arbitrations, and many disputes in civil code jurisdictions. Lucy also advises on and acts in adjudications, from referral stage to enforcement and whether contractual or statutory.
Lucy is always in demand for her forceful advocacy, commercial approach and “stellar” intellectual ability. She has recently been described as “an exceptionally good operator who is easy to deal with and wears her enormous intellect lightly,” “extremely talented with razor-sharp intellect and boundless energy” and “A great advocate, very easy style, clients love working with her.” She “makes stressful litigation feel like driving in a comfortable limo.”
Lucy’s energy and shipbuilding practice and her experience of the offshore standard forms are reflected in her co-editorship (with Mr Justice Constable) of the leading text in its field, Keating on Offshore Construction and Marine Engineering (3rd Edn., published August 2024). She is also co-editor of the looseleaf Keating on JCT and author of the Construction Professionals chapter in Keating on Construction Contracts.
In 2025, Lucy is nominated for Chambers & Partners’ Construction Silk of the Year and was nominated for Legal 500’s Construction and Energy Silk of the Year. Lucy was nominated in 2024 for the Legal 500’s Professional Negligence Silk of the Year. In 2023, Lucy was nominated for Chambers & Partners’ Diversity and Inclusion Outstanding Contribution award and was elected a Bencher of Gray’s Inn. She was one of The Lawyer’s “Hot 100” in 2021. She has been top ranked in Chambers & Partners, Legal 500 and Lexology Index in construction, energy, international arbitration and professional negligence for many years and has been a Lexology Index Global Elite Thought Leader in Construction in 2023, 2024 and 2025. As a junior, she won Chambers and Partners’ Construction Junior of the Year in 2013 and was nominated again in 2015.
Publications
Co-Editor (3rd Edn, Sweet & Maxwell) with Mr Justice Constable of Keating on Offshore Construction and Marine Engineering. Co-Editor of Keating on JCT Contracts (looseleaf, Sweet & Maxwell). Contributor (8th to 9th Editions), author of the Construction Professionals chapter (10th to 11th Editions) and the JCT Commentary chapter (12th Edition) of Keating on Construction Contracts (Sweet & Maxwell). Co-author of Litigation in the TCC (1st Edition).
Personal
Lucy enjoys reading. Her current recommendations are The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, Simon Mason’s DI Wilkins series and Mr Phillips by John Lanchester. Sadly the 2019 and subsequent Reachers are to be avoided at all costs but all the previous ones remain excellent.
Lucy took a sabbatical from the Bar between June 2018 and December 2019 to work as a Senior Advisor for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. She spent 18 months in Sierra Leone working closely with the Mayor of Freetown, the extraordinary Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr OBE. Her blog describing her experiences is
https://thehillsofthechanklybore.com/
