Top Award for LLA Solicitor

Swati Paul, General Counsel at London Luton Airport (LLA), has been named best in-house lawyer at the Law Society’s annual awards, held at the Hilton Park Lane hotel in London.

The accolade recognises Swati’s achievements in delivering a pioneering shared equipment deal for airline partners. Understood to be one of the first of its kind, the model has attracted considerable interest for its potential to improve services in airports internationally.

LLA has implemented the industry-changing initiative over the past two years, enabling the collective pooling of airside equipment. The new system, which contributes to the airport’s ongoing transformation to increase its capacity by 50% by 2020, will increase the efficiency of ground handling operations, bringing benefits to airlines, ground handlers and.

Having negotiated extensively with the incumbent ground handling operators, Swati helped to create the innovative system by designing a novel legal structure. The new structure is robust and delivers the services with appropriate checks and allocation of risk, ensuring that standards and prices are maintained as efficiencies are realised.

Swati Paul said: “I am delighted to win this award. I feel very proud that the Law Society has recognised my work at LLA and our collective efforts to devise new legal structures and models that benefit our business, partners and passengers”.

Nick Barton, CEO of LLA, said: “We are always pleased to see the achievements of our employees recognised and Swati is a worthy winner. Her pragmatism and leadership has paved the way for LLA to develop this world-first initiative, which plays an important role in achieving our ambition to be a bigger, better airport for our partners and passengers”.

Prior to joining LLA in 2015 , Swati was Senior Commercial Lawyer at Transport for London, where she won a number of awards, and was Delta plc's first in-house lawyer with responsibility for establishing their legal function.