Practice Expertise

  • Employment
  • Data protection
  • Privacy and Data
  • Commercial

Areas of Practice

  • Commercial
  • Data protection
  • Employment
  • Privacy and Data

Profile

Gwynneth is an experienced employment lawyer, providing strategic and commercially-focused advice to HRDs and Boards, on all areas of employment law,  from complex organisational restructures and discrimination allegations, to transfers of undertakings, post-termination restrictive covenants and on managing workforce data. Gwynneth is also an accredited trainer and delivers bespoke training to employers.

Gwynneth is the “go to” person for complex employee data privacy issues and she heads up a team of employment lawyers experienced in advising on all aspects of employee data privacy, from policy drafting, to subject access requests and data protection breaches

Employee data privacy work handled by Gwynneth includes:

•advising on the management of and response to data subject access requests made by employees and former employees, involving large volumes of data, tailored to the client’s desired outcomes, achieving time and cost-efficient results

•advising a large global business on an employee data breach involving highly sensitive personnel information and reporting to the ICO, resulting in successful avoidance of further internal issues

•advising on implementation of a full suite of data privacy-related policies, tailored to and aligning with the client’s systems, employee culture and wider employee policies

•advising in respect of an allegation of a data breach coupled with the misuse of private information for the sharing of financial information with a colleague, and on the employer’s vicarious liability

Recent work handled by Gwynneth includes:

  • advising a major retailer on TUPE aspects and the application of the Agency Worker Regulations within commercial and outsourcing contracts;
  • advising on the employment aspects of a business acquisition of a manufacturing assembly operations, and on the effective integration of incoming employees into an existing workforce as well as a few redundancies as a result, whilst ensuring minimal disruption to workforce morale and operations;
  • advising a large motorway service company on the employment aspects and process involved in relation to a change in contractual pension benefits;
  • advising a company on enforcement of post-termination restrictive covenants, resulting in monetary settlement in favour of the client;
  • successful representation of a recruitment business at an employment in its defence against a claim of unfair dismissal and sex discrimination, involving issues of employment status and pregnancy discrimination;
  • advising on and managing a claim brought by a trade union against a University for a protective award arising out of a collective redundancy process.

Gwynneth trained at Howes Percival and qualified as a solicitor in 1994, moving to Wollastons. She joined Shoosmiths in 1996 and spent five years in mortgage-related litigation, with a particular focus on professional negligence actions on behalf of high street banks and building societies and acted in the largest ever case managed litigation. Having retained a keen interest in employment law, she retrained into the employment law unit in September 2001. Gwynneth was made a partner in 2009 and heads up the Milton Keynes employment team.

Gwynneth is recognised as a leading individual in employment law by Legal 500, 2023; and is a ranked lawyer in Chambers 2023.

Areas of Practice

  • Commercial
  • Data protection
  • Employment
  • Privacy and Data

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