A day in the life of an employment lawyer – Colin Smith

My typical day starts with arriving at the office early and grabbing a coffee (which now sadly has to be decaf)! I am one of the partners in the Brachers Employment Law team and therefore my days are normally quite busy.

I provide advice daily to clients across a wide variety of sectors and this includes within the education sector, whether this be for schools, colleges or academies. This is alongside my colleague Abigail Brightwell, who is a Senior Associate in the team.

Much of my day involves having meetings and calls with clients to respond to their employment law queries. As a partner, I also oversee work for other members of the team, this includes our sister company Kent HR (our resident HR Consultants). Brachers, Kent HR and clients benefit from this collaborative approach to work.

When advising on day to day employee relations and employment law points, I focus on early intervention and prevention, so that I can assist clients with handling issues at an early stage before they escalate. To enable me to do this I have built strong relationships with clients, allowing me to understand their objectives, constraints, and priorities.

I regularly assist schools with questions in relation to data protection, safeguarding points, and holiday pay queries. I have also been known to go into schools to provide training on disciplinary and grievance processes.

A large part of my work involves reorganisations, redundancy, restructuring, and TUPE (transfer of undertakings). I recently provided advice to an academy who was acquiring another as part of a complex multiple academy trust (MAT) transfer.

You will often see me presenting on current topics in our monthly webinar series, which is a free 30-minute lunchtime session which is generally on the first Tuesday of the month. The legal employment landscape is always changing and therefore it is important to be kept up to date. In addition, I sit on our firms IT Committee to help ensure continuous improvement within our firms policies and processes to maintain Brachers’ status as a forward thinking place to work and business to partner with.

This content is correct at time of publication