Employment

Advice and Assistance for Employers

The team acts for a growing number of employers in Cumbria area as well as a number of employers further afield.

We can assist with day to day or routine issues via e-mail, telephone or face to face. We can help with a whole range of employment issues, including helping you with disciplinary and grievance matters, dealing with dismissals, redundancy and retirement, handling restructuring situations (and varying contracts of employment), drafting and advising on compromise agreements and equal pay issues.

We also assist employers in putting in place anti discrimination measures and avoiding discrimination in the matter in which they advertise for employees and day to day in the workplace.

We can provide advice and representation for you should any employees or ex-employees bring a claim against you in the Employment Tribunal or the County Court. Although a very large number of potential claims can be prevented by following the correct procedures, it remains the case that employment legislation is often very complex. Even with the best intentions in the world, it is never possible for employers to wholly avoid potential claims.

Should you find yourselves facing a claim, we can advise you on the options, help prepare your case and provide representation at the Employment Tribunal. All of our solicitors in the employment team are expected to carry out their own advocacy, so wherever possible we will represent you ourselves rather than passing your case to a barrister.

On the non-contentious side, we can help employers by preparing contracts of employment, policies and procedures and staff handbooks. These are kept under review and you will be notified if anything significant changes via the client area.

We also have a growing Business Services department and can advise on all the employment aspects of business restructuring, business sales, management buy outs and management buy ins, asset sales and share sales.

All of our employer clients will soon be entitled to free access to our client area, where we post updates about changes to the law. We also provide guidance on how employers can best comply with those pieces of legislation and, where necessary, will also provide new policies and procedures for inclusion in staff handbooks.

Significant changes to employment law tend to be implemented in April and October of each year and so these are good times for employers to check the client area!

 

Advice and Assistance for Employees

We believe that it is important that our solicitors deal with employment cases on both sides and our team has experience of acting for both employers and employees. We can provide advice and assistance to individual clients on all aspects of employment law including unfair dismissal, redundancy, equal pay, discrimination and breaches of contract. We also deal with a large number of compromise agreements.

We have the only specialist and dedicated employment department in South Cumbria. We can see clients at any of our offices in Ulverston or Dalton but can also visit clients at their home addresses for no additional charge.

We strive to offer a competitively priced service and, depending on client requirements, can provide different levels of service, from general “background” advice to advice and assistance with preparing a claim through to a full service including representation at Employment Tribunals or in the County Court.

In some cases, we may be able to offer conditional fee arrangements, whereby we calculate our fees as a fixed share of any compensation or settlement that a client is awarded (meaning that if the client gets nothing, we will normally get nothing too).

There are a number of ways in which your case can be funded, including damaged based agreements. Please see FAQ for more details.

Please contact Steve Walker or Steven Ladhams on 01229 585555.