Employment

Retail

 

We have particular expertise in advising retail contacts and clients and a range of human resources faced by retailers. The team, through Sarah Johnson, is a member of and provides seminars to the Central London Retail Personnel Group.

 

Finance and insurance

 

We act for a number of clients in this sector as well as providing quarterly legal updates at presentations at Lloyd’s of London to the Lloyd’s Human Resources Group, a body of human resources professionals working in the Lloyd’s market.

 

Property/construction

 

We represent a number of the firm’s well-established property/construction clients, advising on all issues relating to employees.

 

Life sciences

 

We have particular experience in advising life sciences companies, which as early-stage, fast-growth businesses with critical intellectual property assets, often invoves issues of confidentiality and restrictive covenants.

 

International law firms

 

As well as advising on international issues for clients both within and outside of the UK, we represent a large number of overseas law firms. Our lawyers are members of the European Employment Lawyers Association.

 

Executive directors

 

Our experience includes acting for the chief executive of a mutual assurance society, a managing director in a multi-million pound discrimination and misrepresentation claim, the HR director of a local Council in litigation against that Council and for directors of Plcs and several high level executives displaced or disquieted by recent economic events. 

 

Business reorganisation

 

We provided a consulting company with proactive and practical advice regarding potential redundancies and restructuring their business. There was a multi-jurisdictional element to the advice as the client has offices in Europe. This required liaison with European lawyers, as well as an organised approach to dealing with managers overseas. The business’ senior managers wished to assist the potentially redundant employees, so practical solutions were implemented to avoid redundancies such as secondments to other bodies and sabbaticals to enable study leave, all of which involved individual consideration and tailored advice. As a result compulsory redundancies were limited and reduced to just a handful.

 

Disputes

 

We successfully defended a case of breach of contract for a client where the claimant, who had insufficient length of service to bring a claim of unfair dismissal, claimed that our client had breached her contract of employment by failing to follow their disciplinary procedure prior to dismissing her. Ina preliminary hearing the Employment Tribunal asserted that there may be an implied duty on an employer to follow their policies and procedures, thereby giving them contractual effect notwithstanding any express term of the policy or employee’s contract to the contrary.

 

At the full hearing we demonstrated that our client’s disciplinary procedure did not have express contractual effect and successfully argued that there was no specific implied duty to follow the terms of an expressly noncontractual policy or procedure. The question of whether our client had followed its disciplinary policy or not was irrelevant as there was no contractual duty on them to do so and so the claim could not succeed.