Our Employment team is highly regarded by both Chambers & Partners and Legal500 for its expertise in handling the full spectrum of employment matters for national and international companies. We have a large team of experts providing a broad range of both contentious and non-contentious advisory support and representation to our impressive FTSE 250 client base. 

We're now looking for an experienced Employment Lawyer to join the team based out of Southampton.

What will you be doing?

This role offers a true mix of work as you'll not only be advising clients on employment disputes (including Employment Tribunal work), TUPE, employee relations and business reorganisations, but you'll also be helping them with contracts, policies and procedures and employee benefits.

You'll work closely with your regional colleagues to provide important support on corporate and real estate projects. The team's expertise help clients to spot critical issues quickly and present solutions that enable them to achieve their business objectives.  You would be working with clients from a number of the firm's key sectors, including retail, financial services, energy and transport.

What does the ideal candidate look like?

You'll be an experienced employment lawyer with an excellent academic background and a strong track record of delivering employment advice. In addition to relevant technical skills we're also looking for strong drafting ability, attention to detail and a sense of commercial pragmatism. An interest in innovation and using technology to work more efficiently would also be beneficial.

You'll need to be a team player whilst also being pro-active in using your initiative and driving matters forward. The ability to build lasting relationships with our clients, excellent communication and inter-personal skills are also key. You'll be part of a growing team so that means plenty of opportunities to develop your business development skills; an important aspect for all of our lawyers. 

To be successful in this role you will need as a minimum:

• At least 2 years of post-qualified experience as an England & Wales Solicitor.
• Proven experience in employment law, gained at a large regional or city firm or in-house.
• Experience in advising clients on complex employment matters, including large scale redundancies and reorganisations.
• A track record of managing multiple Employment Tribunal cases.

We continually work hard to create an open culture that sets us apart from other firms. Our culture gives us much more of a human feel, emphasising that we're more than just suits!

As signatories to the Mindful Business Charter, it's important to us that our people are able to maintain healthy and happy lives, both in and out of work. We have a number of resources and initiatives designed to support health and wellbeing and we're very happy to talk flexible working.

Through our DEI initiatives we create an environment in which difference is valued. We have an Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Group, led by our Board Sponsor, which works with our colleague networks (we currently have firm supported networks for race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage, LGBTQ+, disabilities, neurodiversity, families, and women's career development and we're in constant dialogue with our people about how we expand our networks to better support everybody). Find out more about DEI at WBD here. We encourage applicants from all social backgrounds, ethnicities, disabilities, gender identities and sexual orientations.

We are committed to ensuring our recruitment process is inclusive and accessible to all. If you have a disability or long term condition and need us to make any adjustments to give you the best possible recruitment process, please let us know by contacting the recruiter on the right hand side of this page. Please also let us know if you need this job advert or the application form in a different format.

We will offer an interview to candidates with a disability or long-term condition who meet the minimum criteria for this role. You can opt into this scheme within the application form. Your response to this question is only used for this purpose, is only visible to the recruitment team and is not used for data monitoring. 

We are an in-house recruitment team and will always aim to fill our roles directly in the first instance. If you're an agency, please click here for ways that you can work with us.