About Me & Contact at Usefully Employed

I qualified as a solicitor in 2005, and following training specialised in employment. My next position was with a company as an Employment Law Consultant, mainly providing employment advice and on-site consultancy to small to medium businesses across the UK . I also provided training on employment law to businesses, as well as consultants from other organisations. This role opened my eyes as to the sheer amount of employment work performed by non-solicitor organisations, as well as the importance of prevention over cure. It was not however karma-friendly; I appeared at employers’ premises like an angel of death, and where I trod redundancies and disciplinaries followed.

I’ve now done a complete about-face and transferred to the bar, and am now in a pupillage at a not-particularly-commercial set in a city that isn’t London. I will still have the opportunity to do a reasonable amount of employment law, but I am also looking forward to picking up some other areas. The reasons for changing to a profession that mutters to itself that it’ll be dead in ten years, is in any case becoming ever more fused with solicitors, and which seems to come with a cashflow that makes it impossible to lead a normal life, are complicated. Ultimately, I enjoy advocacy, research and advice, and simply felt that when I was a solicitor the 30-odd each of letters, emails and voicemails every day got in the way.

Employment law is a wonderful area in which to specialise; there is a lot of law, which makes it intellectually interesting, but the facts of the cases are never dry, always involving enough human emotion and turmoil to keep you interested.

If you’re hanging around here you already are, or will hopefully become, as interested in the subject as I am.