Rachel is a partner specialising in legal innovation, change management and process design/implementation often with an Employment law focus. She is part of the Senior Management Team overseeing the Legal Solutions Centre (LSC) based in Plymouth.
Rachel trained with the firm and qualified into the Employment team. She then made the transition to be one of the technical specialists embedded within the LSC. The LSC provides an essential service to the business helping teams deliver the most cost effective solutions to their clients. The team has grown and developed to over 80 paralegals, chartered legal executives, and management information specialists capable of providing support to teams and direct to clients on an ongoing basis for volume projects including e-disclosure, high volume commercial disputes or real estate matters and GDPR related contract review and remediation. Rachel has extended the LSC offering to also include an Employment Service using technology solutions to deal with low risk Employment Tribunal claims, data subject access requests and volume settlement agreements. She is also part of the WBD Navigate team, helping to guide clients through the redundancy process.
Rachel's role has grown to include developing solutions outside of an Employment law sphere and she now works across the business and directly with clients implementing new ways of working whether that is by use of technology, such as HighQ, Kira and Exari, or by looking for process efficiencies and utilising flexible resources.
As an Employment lawyer, Rachel is experienced in dealing with dispute resolution, policy compliance, reviewing terms and conditions of employment and advising on issues arising from business reorganisations. She drafts and negotiates settlement agreements, handles the full range of Employment Tribunal litigation and delivers client training including on Diversity and Inclusion and she also has a specialism advising on business immigration issues.
Experience
Examples of experience include:
- Supervising and supporting service delivery for Employment Tribunal litigation on behalf of clients in the retail and financial services sectors
- Implementing a helpline on behalf of an insurer providing legal advice to its 18,000 policyholders using collaboration software. Managing the paralegals who deal with the initial contact and reporting requirements and supporting lawyers with questions of policy
- Running and supervising small claims brought by former employees in the civil courts for unpaid wages plus supporting on HR debt recovery matters
- Providing Data Protection support and supervising the triage and reporting stage of a Data Protection helpline process
- Leading operations on GDPR compliance projects for a range of clients, overseeing remediation of thousands of commercial contracts
- Preparing settlement agreements for clients' large scale redundancy and TUPE exercises using document automation
- Effecting a Data Subject Access Request document review service and supervising first line review of documents
- Managing disclosure projects involving 100,000s of documents.
