Irwin Mitchell—Pamela Chesterman

National law firm Irwin Mitchell is expanding its planning and environment team with the recruitment of Pamela Chesterman as a new partner.

The appointment takes IM’s specialist Planning and Environment (P&E) team to thirteen. The team has this year been boosted by the recruitment of Jill Crawford, senior associate and environmental specialist in February, which was hot on the heels of Tracy Lovejoy joining as a planning senior associate in Birmingham and Victoria Tague as a planning associate in Manchester.

The P&E Team sits within Irwin Mitchell’s Property Division which will now number 28 partners and over 150 qualified lawyers.

Pamela joins from Brabners where she was legal director and head of planning, and prior to that was head of planning at Prosperity Law. She has experience across a wide area of environmental and planning law, in particular to the development sector, advising on housing and commercial led development as well as on local government issues, having spent a considerable period working at various local authorities in the Northwest.

She helped one of the UK's largest house builders deal with local authorities’ non-determination of applications which threaten to undermine their schemes, working closely with them to negotiate amicable solutions without having to resort to legal actions and to make informed decisions.

Currently she is also retained by a large car park management company to provide planning and advertisement legal advice—acting as their agent in applying for planning permission, advertisement consent and listed building consent, where necessary, for large heritage estates which wish to use their service to provide remote parking solutions to existing car park sites.

Adrian Barlow, director of property legal services at Irwin Mitchell said: 'Both Planning and Environment are currently fast-moving disciplines where our clients need up to date and strategic legal advice to keep ahead of the game, particularly at a time of political change. Our team is headed by the highly respected Claire Petricca-Riding and works as a national practice, advising clients all over the country.

'Pamela will play an important part in helping us to fulfil Irwin Mitchell’s  ambition to provide first-class advice to clients.  She comes with great hands-on experience, especially her in-depth knowledge of both local government and the development sector and will be a great asset to the P&E practice and the wider property department.'

Pamela has considerable contacts across the Northwest and will be based in Irwin Mitchell’s Liverpool and Manchester offices, supporting Irwin Mitchell’s clients in that region and nationally.