Legal Eagles

When UNISON won its employment tribunal fees case in the Supreme Court last year, the landmark victory thrust the union’s in-house legal team into the limelight. U met two of them, head of legal services Adam Creme and his colleague Shantha David, the legal officer who ran the five-year case against the government. Shantha David It was two days after the biggest legal case in her life, the judicial review in which UNISON defeated the government in one of the most important decisions in the history of employment law. After a string of media interviews talking about the victory, Shantha David was finally sitting alone, at home. And she burst into tears. “I was so overcome,” she recalls. “It was all the feeling of four and a half years of work – the grafting, the slog, the legal arguments, witness statements, the last-minute dashes to court. As solicitor teams go, ours was small – it was just me and my secretary Kate Osborne. And the bundles [legal papers] we prepared ran to thousands of pages for each hearing. “You’re so consumed by all of it. And you’re so tired. Winning or losing, it’s always a strange anti-climax. You’ve spent all this energy fighting for something, and then it’s over.” She laughs. “It’s like the end of a season of Game of Thrones.” She admits that on that August morning the “magnitude” of the result still hadn’t sank in. Though, yes, there was satisfaction amid the tears. “There was definitely a sense of r...
Source: UNISON Health care news - Category: UK Health Authors: Tags: Article Magazine employment rights employment tribunal fees legal services Source Type: news