A recession doesn’t necessarily mean more employment work. Ten to fifteen years ago we had to hold a lot of hands but now companies have very sophisticated HR departments. They handle most things pretty well themselves and only contact lawyers when it comes to complex matters.

Bonuses are definitely being reined in because profits are poor. Banks also have a PR issue to deal with: they can’t hand out massive bonuses when they’re accepting Government funding. Some people might get upset by smaller or no bonuses, but it will be difficult to legally challenge it. Three years ago, in a case against Commerzbank, the Court of Appeal said that to challenge a discretionary bonus the applicant needed to show that the employer acted perversely or irrationally. It’s difficult to say that cutting bonuses is perverse or irrational when banks are facing up to the current economic climate.

People in the financial sector are signing compromise agreements more readily than they used to. They’re generally happy to accept the money and move on. They probably realise there are very few jobs around and they don’t want to make a name for themselves. And the level of severance compensation also seems to be lower than previously.

Companies should explain to their staff why things are different and manage expectations. They should explain why bonuses are a lot less and make sure that everyone has the same principles applied. They need to be careful not to have some getting bonuses in the millions and the rest getting peanuts.

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I think the trade unions are becoming more militant. They have become much more confident after being shackled by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. In a boom, it’s easy to manage public sector pay, but in a recession it’s really difficult. Unions are pushing hard up against that issue and there’s a whole generation of HR departments that have never experienced an aggressive union.

How did I become an employment lawyer? When I was still at school, I went to companies asking them to sponsor me at university. British Aircraft Corporation, now British Aerospace, gave me an apprenticeship while I was at Oxford and so I worked there when I wasn’t studying. They put me through various legal departments. I had a spell in the industrial relations department at the time the Industrial Relations Act came into force. That made me become an employment lawyer. I eventually joined them full-time in 1976 as one of the first in-house employment lawyers in the UK. The area was so dynamic at the time. Dockers were being jailed for going on strike.

I’ve worked at three law firms. I was at Baker & McKenzie for about 18 years and by 1998 I had headhunters ringing me up, like buses arriving three in a row. I was 46. The headhunters told me I should think about whether I wanted to see out my days at Bakers or set up a new practice with a clean sheet of paper. My son George was three and I worked out that I needed to work for at least another 17 years. I figured I wouldn’t get too many other opportunities to go out and pick my own team.

I went to McDermott Will & Emery for seven years. I moved on because I felt I had taken the group there as far as I could. The market had become so squeezed, with a lot of firms having decent employment practices. You really need a big corporate practice to leverage off these days and McDermott didn’t have that. I didn’t think it had the plan to get there.

Americans value grey hair in lawyers much more than we do in Europe. Over here, there’s quite a lot of generational and gender preference in legal services. The employment world is much more touchy-feely than other sectors and HR professionals want to relate to the person they speak to every day. An HR manager with two young kids might want to deal with someone in our team who also has two young kids. They want to have something in common with them. A 35 year-old HR manager probably doesn’t want an employment lawyer who is old enough to be their dad, not for day-to-day work anyway. Law firms need to deliver a service with a range of lawyers who can build the right relationships. You wouldn’t go to a silk unless the matter was really urgent. That’s where grey hair has its place.

Fraser Younson is head of the employment, incentives and pensions group at Berwin Leighton Paisner

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