Katrina Yates

Property

Katrina has a busy property litigation practice and is particularly strong on disputes involving land registration, commercial landlord and tenant, and planning law issues that arise in the real estate context.

Her practice encompasses:

• Development work (including overage, options, and promotion agreements)
• Commercial landlord and tenant (including forfeiture, landlord’s consents, dilapidations, rent review, and disputes under the 1954 Act)
• Land registration (including alteration, rectification, indemnity and judicial review)
• Sale and purchase disputes (including misrepresentation, forfeiture of deposits, and disputes over vacant possession)
• Rectification of contracts and deeds
• Adverse possession and boundary disputes
• Easements
• Restrictive covenants
• Nuisance
• Trusts of Land
• Property-related professional negligence.

Katrina has significant experience acting in commercial disputes for large institutional clients, including property investors, developers, and household name retailers. With a background of experience in complementary areas of planning law, she is the counsel of choice for development work, or any property litigation case which has a planning law element.

Since 2020, she has also been appointed to the prestigious Attorney-General’s A Panel of Junior Counsel. In that capacity, she regularly advises central government departments on property issues of public importance and is standing counsel to the Chief Land Registrar.    

During her career at Landmark, Katrina has developed extensive breadth and depth of written and oral advocacy experience in the Senior Courts, including in the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal, the High Court, as well in the First-tier Tribunal, the Upper Tribunal, and the County Court.  Her varied experiences have also previously taken her into the magistrates’ courts, the Crown Court, and public inquiries, from which she has developed agility and clarity as an advocate.

Recent and notable appearances include:

• Bay Dining Ltd v BNP Paribas Depositary Services Ltd (22 March 2023): successfully acted for BNP Paribas in defence of an application for relief from forfeiture of a commercial lease.
  
• Campbell v Chief Land Registrar [2022] EWHC 200 (ChD), before HH Judge Hodge KC: struck out multiple unmeritorious claims which sought to contend that various mortgages were invalid for failure to be executed by the lender as well as the borrower, based on a misapprehension of the Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989, s.2.     Also obtained an extended civil restraint order against one litigant, which led to the making of a general civil restraint order on 2 March 2023 by Edwin Johnson J.

• Littler v Linden Ltd (29 March 2022): defended a developer against a claim for an injunction, which sought the removal and relocation of a foul drainage system.

• Billings & Billings v Coyde Construction Ltd (2021): trial as to the validity and construction of an easement, which included a challenge to whether the easement had been properly registered so as to bind successors in title.

• R (HCP Hendon Ltd) v Chief Land Registrar [2020] EWHC 1278 (Admin), before Martin Spencer J: successfully defended the Registrar’s decision to register a new lease as a concurrent lease, and in so doing clarified the law on the manner in which the Property Register to leasehold title can be relied on for the purpose of establishing the scope of the demise.

• Coventry Parkside Development Ltd v Uninn Parkside Development Ltd (Claim No. PT-2020-000075): acted for the defendant in an application for an injunction to restrain an airspace trespass caused by a crane oversailing an adjacent development site.
  
• Halfords Ltd v Turret Property Investments Ltd (County Court at Sheffield, Claim No. C01BS690): successfully represented Halfords at a trial of its business lease renewal claim, which included a rarely fought dispute as to the valuation of the new rent.

• Antoine v Barclays Bank UK Plc & Chief Land Registrar [2018] EWCA Civ 2846 [2018] EWHC 395 (Ch): successfully defended the Chief Land Registrar in the High Court and in the Court of Appeal in relation to a claim for rectification of the registrar, following the setting aside of a court order that had been obtained by fraud.  

• R (Best) v Chief Land Registrar [2016] QB 23 (CA): with Jonathan Karas KC, acted for the Registrar in this landmark Court of Appeal case testing the novel question of whether an adverse possession application is valid, where the possession on which the applicant relies to establish his claim constitutes the criminal offence of squatting in a residential building, under s. 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012.

Other experience:

Katrina sat on the University of Bristol’s Law School Advisory Board between 2013 and 2016 and is a guest LLB land law lecturer. She is a regular contributor to the Civil Court Service (the “Brown Book”) and the Civil Court Practice (the “Green Book”).

When she is not working at the law, Katrina is a keen singer and violinist who performs whenever she has the chance. She also enjoys learning languages and travelling, most recently taking-up surfing in Portugal and Morocco.