Shoosmiths LLP

Employment

Sian is an employment and corporate immigration principal associate in the Solent Employment Team. She provides strategic and commercial advice to a wide range of clients and always ensures that she always invests the time into understanding her clients’ business needs and provides advice in a format which is ‘on point’ and easy to digest.

Sian provides day-to-day employment advice to her clients on grievances, disciplinary issues, discrimination issues, collective redundancies, enforceability of restrictive covenants and TUPE transfers.  Sian represents clients at Tribunal where she has an enviable success rate. She also provides support to the corporate team with M&A work and advises individuals/senior executives on their exit from a business and their settlement agreements. Sian regularly advises on all aspects of corporate immigration from right to work checks to obtaining and maintaining sponsor licences.

Her recent work includes:

• successfully representing a manufacturer of contact lenses in defending a claim of constructive unfair dismissal and wrongful dismissal. Sian adopted a particularly robust approach, made an application for strike out and conducted the advocacy at Tribunal where she was successful. Her approach has saved the client significant time and future legal fees;
• advising on a complex and sensitive investigation of a group of employees who had set up a WhatsApp group on their company phone and had made sexist and racist remarks. All but one employee resigned as a result before the disciplinary hearing. One employee was dismissed for gross misconduct. There were no resulting claims;
• supporting a client in the hospitality sector in the harmonisation and implementation of new contracts involving significant changes to employee remuneration including all aspects of the consultation process to over 400 employees;
• supporting a large retailer in reporting a change in ownership of the wider group and applying for a new licence. Sian has supported generally in the operation of its sponsorship licence including obtaining Tier 2 general visas, any change of circumstance and reporting of migrant activity; and
• supporting Shoosmiths’ corporate team with numerous due diligence reports, advising on indemnities and warranties in various Share purchase agreements.

Sian regularly speaks at seminars, runs training sessions and interactive ‘bite size briefings' on various topics for clients.

Sian trained with Shoosmiths and qualified in 2007. She was promoted to Senior Associate in 2017.

Sian trained with Shoosmiths and qualified in 2007. She was promoted to Senior Associate in 2017.