Legal Futures reports
A law firm has been ordered to pay damages of nearly £19,000 for unfairly dismissing a pregnant paralegal after going through a tick-box redundancy exercise.
Though Farzana Yasin’s pregnancy was not the primary reason she was let go by Bolton firm Swift Lawyers, it was a factor in the way her redundancy was handled, said Employment Judge Dunlop in Manchester.
In 2017 the firm sought to pivot away from personal injury and Ms Yasin joined to work on cavity wall insulation claims. She was a law graduate who had completed the legal practice course.
She had two consecutive maternity leave periods from October 2018, during which time little work was done on the cavity wall files as the firm waited for the outcome of other cases.
She returned to work in November 2020 and was put on furlough when a new lockdown began in January 2021, with the firm’s litigation work quiet. Soon after, she revealed that she was pregnant again.
In the following weeks, the firm decided to stop its cavity wall work and make Ms Yasin redundant.
The tribunal found that redundancy was the genuine reason for her dismissal and that she was not selected for redundancy because of her pregnancy: “She was selected because she was in a ‘pool of one’ as the only employee directly affected by the decision not to progress with the [cavity wall] files.”
However, the tribunal held that Swift Lawyers did not engage in a “genuine and meaningful consultation” – Ms Yasin was informally told she was going to be made redundant and the process that followed was a “box-ticking exercise” for a decision which was “already final”. She was dismissed in March 2021.
“Particularly in circumstances where an employee has been absent from the business during furlough, they cannot be assumed to have the same knowledge as the employer about conditions ‘on the ground’ in the business,” the tribunal said.
“An open dialogue about the need for redundancies, as well as the basis for selection, when the proposals are at a formative stage, rather than when they are ‘a done deal’, is likely to prevent the sort of suspicions and misconceptions which have arisen in this case.”
The tribunal also found that the firm fell short in its attempts to find Ms Yasin suitable alternative employment, in contrast to a personal injury colleague who was found other opportunities within the business when his work was drying up.
“More specifically, we reject the respondent’s evidence that there was no role available in the conveyancing department,” Judge Dunlop went on.
Law firm to pay £19k for unfairly dismissing pregnant paralegal
