David is a partner in the Employment Team.
David is a solicitor-advocate having gained his higher-rights of audience in 2014. He qualified as a solicitor in 2013 after previously qualifying as a Chartered legal executive in 2011.
David spent over 11 years working at BT as part of the in-house legal team. He then spent two years at 3HR Corporate Solicitors, a City law firm specialising in Japanese, Chinese and Korean clients before joining Machins in 2019. He has extensive experience advising clients in both contentious and non-contentious employment matters. He has advised senior HR managers and company CEOs on large scale corporate restructures and redundancies. He has conducted in excess of 150 employment tribunal hearings and has appeared before the President of the Employment Appeal Tribunal.
It has been widely reported this week in the mainstream media that a couple had their divorce finalised in error following a mistake by solicitors which a senior judge has refused to overturn. The couple were separated and had applied for a divorce which had reached conditional order stage of the divorce. It would appear
Termination of Parental Responsibility is rarely made by the Court and only ever in exceptional circumstances. Following a recent private family law case acting for a mother who successfully obtained a termination of Parental Responsibility order to end the father’s Parental Responsibility, we asked Laura Martin-Read, Senior Associate Solicitor to explain what Parental Responsibility is
Millions of employees now have the right to request flexible working to determine where and when they work. The new rights are part of the Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Bill, which came into effect on 6 April. Flexible working is a broad term and can relate to working hours or pattern including part-time, term-time, flexi-time,
Jeremy Hunt delivered his Spring Budget on 6 March, and it will probably be his last major fiscal announcement ahead of this year’s anticipated general election. With a focus on reducing tax for the working population and helping parents, there were several announcements in the Budget that affect businesses and employees which I consider and
The Government is planning to reintroduce fees for employment tribunal claims seven years after they were judged to be unlawful by the Supreme Court. The Ministry of Justice is now seeking views on the proposals in a consultation document, Employment Tribunals and the Employment Appeal Tribunal The document says the Government has learned the lessons
The maximum fine for employing an illegal worker and failing to carry out the appropriate checks hastripled as part of the Government’s drive to clamp down on illegal migration. Under the new Code of practice on preventing illegal working the civil penalty for employers hasincreased from £15,000 to a maximum of £45,000 per illegal worker
Supermarket chain Tesco has successfully appealed an injunction that prevented it from terminating employees’ contracts in order to offer new contracts on less favourable terms. The issue goes back as far as 2007, when Tesco shut several distribution centres and opened new ones elsewhere in the country. The existing distribution staff were offered an enhanced
A teacher who was made to express her breastmilk either in an unhygienic bathroom or in her car was a victim of harassment related to sex, a judge has ruled. The case involved Ms T Mellor, who was a teacher at the Academy Trust at Mirfield Free Grammar School. Mellor had her first child in
The case involved JM Solutions UK Ltd. Its two directors lived in Romania, and since the Covid pandemic they communicated with staff via email and telephone. The employee, referred to as Dave, was the company’s office and sales manager, and was responsible for dealing with customers and negotiating rates. His contract of employment contained a
An employment tribunal had been wrong to hold that an employee’s alleged menopausal symptoms did not amount to a disability for the purposes of a discrimination claim. That was the ruling of the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) in a case involving Leicester City Council and one of its childcare social workers, Ms Rooney. Rooney had