Allen & Overy

Sonya Barcant

I'm off to Liberty!!

This is my last blog from A&O as the great news this month is that I got the Liberty secondment that I applied for and so my final two blogs will be from during my time at Liberty.  I’m very excited about the secondment as it’ll be fascinating to spend 3 months working with human rights lawyers doing something completely different to the type of law we do at A&O.  Although I have some general knowledge about human rights law, I will definitely be doing some reading up on the subject in the next few weeks to make sure I’m as prepared as possible!  So more on Liberty in the next two blogs…

“The department has been really busy and I’ve been involved in several very interesting projects.”

As for employment, time has absolutely flown (as it generally seems to around here) and I’ve only got a few weeks left now.  The department has been really busy and I’ve been involved in several very interesting projects.  A lot of what I’ve been doing has been disclosure for different stages of various cases.  For example, I’ve been helping another employment trainee with full tribunal disclosure which is a big exercise – the client has to do searches for all documents relevant to the case (whether or not they support their case) and this can lead to a huge amount of documents to review.  Although, everyone pulls together in such cases so that the burden doesn’t fall too heavily on one person.  It’s a really interesting part of the case to work on as you begin to see the story come together through the documents and get an insight into the working (and political!) practices of that company.

I’ve also been involved in remedy disclosure which is lighter and has a different purpose.  Once a case has been decided, the tribunal may order for a separate hearing to be held in order to decide purely upon remedy.  For this hearing, each party has to disclose documents relevant only to the question of remedy and so you have to think about what you want to prove.  For example, if the first tribunal held that the claimant had been unfairly dismissed then, in order to limit your liability, you may try to show that the company later went through a redundancy process and that the claimant would have been at serious risk of redundancy, and so wouldn’t have been with the company very long even if they hadn’t been unfairly dismissed.  For the question of loss of salary or bonus for future years, the company may try to show that given the current state of the market, they haven’t increased salaries by much or haven’t awarded large bonuses, or even that the claimant’s individual performance was so poor s/he wouldn’t have received a bonus at all.  All these are considerations relevant to the case I’m working on and it’s been really interesting to learn how to think strategically as well as legally.

Amidst all this, I jetted off to the southern coast of Spain for a week of nothing but utter relaxation!  It was a bit touch and go whether we would be able to leave (and then get back!) because of the ash chaos but luckily we made it there.  I haven’t had a holiday in a long time where I’ve done so little in the way of activity but it was lovely.  As expected, there’s also been a lot of wedding prep in the last few weeks!  Most important has been making the invitations which has been hugely time consuming but I’m so glad we’ve done it.  Not only has it saved us lots of money but they’re unique and personal to us and hopefully people will appreciate that.  We’re also going to make the other stationery (e.g. menus, order of service, thank you cards) with the same design, but will have a bit of a break before we tackle that! 

So all in all a busy month!  I’m looking forward to my final weeks in employment as my trainer is starting witness interviews for another case this week and I’ll be attending the interviews with her and producing the first draft witness statements.  It’s a very valuable drafting skill to have and not one I’ve had a go at yet in the department so a good way to finish off what has been a fantastic seat!

If you would like to leave a comment or ask a question, please follow the link below. Your comments will need to be approved by a moderator before it is added to this site.

Comment