Shoosmiths LLP

Sian Hoare

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.

Stuart Lawrenson

Stuart is head of Shoosmiths' Solent Employment Team and has nearly 20 years of experience in providing employment law support to HR teams and senior executives. Stuart advises a broad range of clients, local and national, on all aspects of employment law, both contentious and non-contentious. He is an experienced and successful Tribunal advocate where he has successfully defended claims, including the obtaining of costs awards, brought against employers. He has also successfully brought claims on behalf of employees. Stuart has a particular interest and expertise advising clients in the retail sector and has a wealth of experience advising and supporting clients with HMRC national minimum wage investigations. He prides himself in giving commercial, practical and “no-nonsense” advice. Stuart regularly deals with knotty disciplinary and grievance issues often involving senior employees and claims of discrimination. On a more strategic level he has much experience advising on restructures, senior executive terminations, large scale redundancies and the employment aspects arising out of corporate transactions including TUPE. Recent advice has included: advising in relation to a complex outsourcing scenario involving multiple contractors. The project involved advising on the application of TUPE and the drafting of bespoke employee provision for the commercial contract; advising on the employment issues arising when a client went into a property led CVA; providing strategic advice ahead of a complicated national restructure of a key client which included advising on the need to collectively consult; advising and dealing with a particularly complex data subject access request brought by an in-house lawyer involving over 280,000 documents. The project required the documents to be reviewed for both the purposes of the DSAR but also for the purposes of disclosure relating to satellite litigation; successfully pursing a claim for unfair dismissal on behalf of a senior manager against a city council, the claim being worth circa £300,000 to the individual as a result of the pension element; advising on a complex Tribunal claim brought by a Head of HR. The claim included claims of unfair dismissal, sex discrimination and equal pay. Stuart advised throughout and represented the client at Judicial Mediation where the claim was settled; and advising three clients in the retail sector in relation to HMRC national minimum wage investigations. In addition to his advice work, Stuart is a keen and passionate trainer in employment law and best business practice. He has designed and delivered bespoke courses for both managers and HR professionals on topics ranging from practical investigation training, employee representative training (collective consultation) to various courses on GDPR (including how to deal with data subject requests). Stuart speaks regularly at internal and external seminars and conferences on employment law and best business practice. Stuart is ranked as a "Leading Lawyer" in the Legal 500.