Few children know what they want to be when they grow up, but the recently appointed managing director of Wikborg Rein's Singapore office, Ina Lutchmiah, knew from an early age that she was destined for the legal profession.
Her father is a co-founder and managing director of a steel trading company, so she knew what a bill of lading was at “a very young age”.
“One of my favourite school holiday activities was going to my father's office and pretending I too was negotiating deals and contracts,” she said.
“So, it will come as no surprise that I headed off to university in England to study law and then completed a masters in maritime law at the University of Southampton before joining an international maritime law firm in London in 2008.”
Lutchmiah described her father as being her “biggest role model”.
“His ‘there is nothing that's impossible if you work hard for it' mindset both inspired and propelled me to follow my ambitions to become an international commercial lawyer,” she said.
Lutchmiah, who describes herself as a “citizen of the world”, was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, but grew up in Athens, Greece, until she left for university in England.
“I then spent 16 happy years in England before relocating to Singapore to head up Wikborg Rein's transactional practice in the Asia Pacific region and now the Singapore office as well,” she explained.
During the early years of her career, Lutchmiah said she was given the opportunity to work on several “interesting offshore transactions”, including the West Java floating storage and regasification unit project, the first in Asia, as well as a secondment to a “well-known FPSO [floating production storage and offloading] contractor”.
Maritime and offshore industries
“These opportunities cemented my decision to focus on the maritime and offshore industries with, primarily, a transactional focus,” she said.
“Whilst this is quite a specialist focus, the range of international transactions I have worked on over the years suggests otherwise.”
These have included newbuilding contracts to asset recycling and “all manner of asset life-cycle matters”; floating LNG projects; renewables; financing and leasing; joint-venture structuring and drilling contracts.
Lutchmiah said the projects she has worked on are very often “industry and/or jurisdictional firsts".
“There are multi-jurisdictional issues to consider, tight timelines and high expectations, in other words, no work day is the same and the wide-ranging benefits of project success, e.g. the supply of gas to remote regions or the implementation of new technologies, are all-round rewarding”.
In the Legal 500 United Kingdom 2020 rankings, Lutchmiah was recommended for oil and gas projects and ranked as a "Rising Star".
She is also well known for her expertise in LNG projects, and regulatory work in connection with ship and rig recycling.
Finn Bjornstad, global managing partner of Wikborg Rein, said: “As the Legal 500 rankings acknowledged, Ina is a very talented lawyer and has in a short period of time proved herself in Singapore.
“She will play an important role for us in the region, and I am confident that our clients will benefit from both her strong legal mind and personal skills.”
