Grace Lima

Grace Lima is a Gibraltar-based litigator and advocate specialising in family and matrimonial law, employment law, personal injury and clinical negligence, with particular experience in complex, high-value and cross-border disputes. Called to the Gibraltar Bar in 2014, she has built her practice on trust. Clients and their advisers rely on her for clear, candid advice, meticulous preparation and determined advocacy from the first consultation to the final hearing.

A significant part of Grace’s practice is devoted to family and matrimonial litigation. She acts in complex financial proceedings arising from relationship breakdown, including disputes involving substantial and unconventional asset structures, digital assets and cryptocurrency. She also has extensive experience in private children matters, including international relocation, cross-border jurisdictional disputes and proceedings engaging the 1996 Hague Convention on the Protection of Children, and handles these sensitive matters with discretion and care.

Grace is regularly instructed in cases involving difficult questions of jurisdiction, procedure and applicable law, and is accustomed to managing factually and legally complex proceedings involving extensive evidence, expert material and sensitive issues. She frequently retains conduct of matters from the initial stages of a dispute through to substantive hearing and, where necessary, appeal, giving clients continuity and a single trusted point of contact throughout.

Her employment practice includes representing parties in substantial contentious proceedings before the Employment Tribunal, as well as employment appeals before the Supreme Court of Gibraltar exercising its appellate jurisdiction.

Grace also has considerable experience in personal injury and clinical negligence litigation, including claims raising complex issues of causation, limitation and jurisdiction, together with procedural and jurisdictional disputes arising under the Civil Procedure Rules.

As an advocate, Grace has appeared before the Employment Tribunal, Magistrates’ Court, Supreme Court of Gibraltar and Gibraltar Court of Appeal. She has also assisted in a matter before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Her practice therefore spans litigation at both first instance and appellate level.

Clients and instructing professionals turn to Grace in cases requiring strategic management of complex evidence, urgent applications, difficult jurisdictional issues and contested hearings, trusting her to protect their interests when the stakes are highest.

Grace graduated with a First Class LLB (Hons) from Aberystwyth University before completing the Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC) at Northumbria University. She was awarded the Calcott Pryce Subject Prize in Criminal Justice and the Penal System and Human Rights – Theories, Institutions and Remedies, and in 2014 received the Baron Dr Ver Heyden de Lancey Prize from the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple.

Grace was called to the Bar of England and Wales in July 2014 and the Gibraltar Bar in December 2014.