Kath Herbert

Career

Kath qualified as a Solicitor in January 1987 and joined Birketts in January 2010. She is a Partner and leads our Commercial Property Team in our Cambridge office and is Head of Birketts’ Strategic Land Group.

Kath has extensive commercial property experience having worked in the sector for over 30 years. She specialises in strategic land development work acting predominantly for landowners. She has acted on some complex and high profile projects including the internationally renowned Cambridge Biomedical Campus, Darwin Green strategic site for mixed use development and several major strategic sites around the country including Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Essex, Kent, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire. She has a national reputation for her work and is sought out by landowners and their agents for her particular expertise in this area where there is often much at stake for landowners and the projects can take several decades to complete. Her clients praise her for her encyclopaedic knowledge (Chambers UK 2020) and her decisive and no nonsense approach. She is singled out as “a leader and an excellent negotiator“. She has developed a centre of excellence for strategic land work within Birketts where there is now a large team of lawyers working with Kath on these projects which can take many years to reach the end stages.

Kath’s work involves advising on joint venture agreements, options, promotion and hybrid agreements, collaboration agreements, structures for mitigating tax on equalisation of value and cost and associated planning and infrastructure agreements to enable schemes to be implemented. She has advised on many sites taking them from the early pre-allocation stage, through the planning process, infrastructure delivery and ultimately to sales and most importantly throughout the process protecting landowners to ensure maximum value is delivered.