Gulley Shimeld Junior Lawyer of the Year

Who? Gulley Shimeld, 31, associate in the corporate group at City firm Lovells.

Why is he in the news? Won the Law Society Excellence Awards Junior Lawyer of the Year for his pro bono work on behalf of ParalympicsGB, Britain’s team at the Beijing Paralympic Games.

Background: Born in Australia, commerce and law degree at the University of New South Wales. After qualifying in 2002, worked at a national firm in Australia, then spent two years in-house with a production company before moving to Lovells in London in 2006.

How he got involved: Lovells undertakes over 16,000 hours of pro bono work a year.

What did he do? ‘We advised on a wide range of commercial, corporate sponsorship and intellectual property issues and were on site in Beijing to provide legal support to the athletes.

‘At first glance, most of the commercial agreements that came across my desk seemed to reflect fairly standard arrangements. However, inevitably they all involved lots of fine tuning to reflect the unique arrangements that ParalympicsGB negotiated with its partners to lever opportunities and support other stakeholders in disability sport with basically no budget.

‘Any documents or advice in relation to athletes also had special significance because I knew that any issues affecting results, world records and medals would be hotly contested and there could not be any room for gaps that could be damaging for ParalympicsGB and heartbreaking for athletes.’

What was it like? ‘I’ve met and worked with amazing and inspirational people. My work with ParalympicsGB has been rewarding personally as well as professionally. It definitely came as a surprise that I had put in so many hours over the last 12 months because it has never felt like a chore.’