The evolving landscape of employment solicitors in London.

With rapidly evolving technology and the effect of globalization on a business, there emerges out the need for a major shift in client requirements.

In the era of 1980, employment lawyers were a hard-to-find career field in the UK and those who have expertise in this domain worked almost primarily in private practice in a lesser number of firms, majorly in London.  “Employment departments” as such were largely not popular; almost all of them were partners of either the litigation or corporate commercial sections of various firms.

Even be the beginning of the 1990s, when the UK Employment Lawyers Association was setup, it writhed a lot to fetch 100 members. However, the Association now has more than 6,000 members. As the demand rose for expert advice, so low-size law firms across the region witnessed the opportunity to develop specialist practices of their own, and employment solicitors in London became a selling point of many commercial firms.

It is quite interesting to understand how this has been reflected in the corporate landscape. Back in the day, it was very much difficult to find human resources directors participating in the primary boards of companies.  In present times, such as the value of workforces; it would be hard to get a corporation of any size where the HR director’s seat is not a board level post.

As employment law performs have evolved and employment law has become more complicated, a new character has been developed in many of the more evolved practices: that of professional assistance or professional expansion lawyer – a skilled employment practitioner who is no longer client-servicing but helps colleagues in guaranteeing that they keep on top of this quickly changing field of law. With the flurry of case results, employment legal publications, analyses, blogs and so on now available on the internet, getting such support has become very much essential if one is going to be able to keep well-informed of the various developments in the relevant field.

One change emerging from the rising self-consciousness of employment law as a separate expert area over recent decades has been the development of niche practices. This has become a well-settled phenomenon in various countries in Europe and throughout North America. Considering wider afield, it is good to witness that, as markets emerge, so does the arrival of employment law departments and, lately, employment-only law firms. For instance, historically there have been a considerable number of influences in the Asia-Pacific region where no individual lawyers have spent all of their time performing employment work, as there just was not adequate casework or the need for advice to support a complete practice. That is now evolving, in some cases quite rapidly and intensely, as some of the Asia-Pacific countries bring in new workplace regulation and the compliance requirements of businesses operating there grow. More and more Asia-based law firms are, consequentially, developing employment sections, and it is likely only a consideration of time before people begin to witness a growth in niche practices in the area.