Market report: employment
With the UK’s unemployment figures set to hit record highs, The In-House Lawyer asks what the future holds for employment law.
A growing gig economy, automation, Brexit… the threats to UK employment were already growing. Then a global pandemic hit. As life is redrawn and rebuilt on a near-daily basis by Covid-19, employment lawyers are struggling to recontextualise existing laws while grappling with the ever-changing guidelines being churned out at dizzying speed. Kathryn Dooks, a partner in the employment team at Kemp Little, recalls the ‘mad rush’ at the beginning of the crisis.
‘Everyone was just trying to do what they could in a very short space of time, with very limited information available from the government. The guidelines weren’t always clear – often the government used Twitter to release policy on certain points, so it was a bit of a mad scramble, and employers were just doing their best.’
