020 7405 4600

Accessibility Icon
Juli Lau

Juli Lau

Partner

020 7405 4600

Contact by email

Juli is a public procurement and contracts specialist with particular expertise in public infrastructure projects, covering the fields of waste, energy and utilities.

She has acted for public authorities on a number of PPP/PFI projects and has extensive experience advising on public procurement law for local government, central government and utilities.

Juli regularly leads commercial legal support to public authorities on high-value waste projects. She is also well-versed with industry-standard construction contracts.

She gives regular talks on her areas of expertise, and her written work has appeared in the Local Government Lawyer newsletter, the CICES Construction Law Review and on LexisNexis PSL.

Skills and strengths:

As an accredited Legal Project Manager, Juli offers clients strategic and project management support on complex procurements and takes a collaborative approach when leading other legal advisers and professional consultants within project teams.

Juli is a member of the Procurement Lawyers Association and the LexisNexis Forum of Experts for Public Procurement.

Your advice has been clear, consistent and comprehensive, even when delivered under extreme time pressures. All the team members hold you in high regard and you quickly gained their complete confidence. You’ve consistently gone far beyond the requirement of meeting our requests and added significant value in the comprehensiveness of your responses. The thoroughness of your approach has ensured that further iterations were not required, which has allowed significant time and cost savings in the procurement cycle. Thanks once again for your hard work and for the incisiveness and intelligence which has made our procurements so much easier.

Procurement Lead, Thames Tideway Tunnel

  • Central Government
  • Energy Sector
  • Local Government
  • Waste Sector
  • Water Sector
  • Construction Contracts
  • Infrastructure
  • Procurement
  • Advising several local authorities on competitive dialogue procurements for long-term waste management contracts, leading legal negotiations with bidders, including acting for a London local authority throughout the procurement of its waste services contract valued in the region of £200 million.
  • Advising local authorities on high-value residual waste treatment (including Energy from Waste) PPP/PFI contracts, most recently advising on contract changes, changes in waste legislation and policy, and expiry/handback matters.
  • Leading the provision of day-to-day legal support to the Governance, Assurance and Audit team of the New Hospitals Programme, a significant programme in the government’s major projects portfolio.
  • Secondment to the in-house legal team of the Thames Tideway Tunnels Project, a nationally significant infrastructure project worth approximately £4.2bn.
  • Advising a water utility company on its development of a major strategic water resource, working as part of a multi-disciplinary consultancy team, providing legal and procurement advice on commercial strategy and on the procurement of construction and professional services contracts.
  • Local authority energy schemes: advising local authorities on procurement and contracts relating to retrofit district heating, retrofit solar panels, and energy solutions advisory services.
  • Advising on inter-authority and joint waste agreements between multiple local authorities.

The British Chambers of Commerce published a report on small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) spend in public procurement. The report shows that SME spending has stagnated, with only 20% of all public procurement spend being with SMEs in 2024, up only 1% from the 2023 spend. The BCC’s research highlights the important role that local government…

Read more

Recent reports, such as that published by Middlesbrough Council earlier this year exploring their value for money arrangements, have outlined how some local authorities have struggled to secure economy, efficiency and effectiveness in the use of resources. With several high-profile section 114 notices also being issued by authorities including Birmingham City Council in late 2023,…

Read more

Background and current context On 22 May 2024 the Procurement Regulations 2024 (the ‘2024 Regulations’) were made, but the majority of the provisions do not come into force until the Procurement Act 2023 (the ‘2023 Act’) substantively commences. This is necessarily the case because the 2024 Regulations implement various aspects and details from the 2023…

Read more