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Stephen Cairns

Partner, Newcastle

Stephen is a Partner based in Newcastle specialising in employment law.
Stephen Cairns large

Experience

He specialises in providing employment advice to public and private sector employers on the management of complex HR processes and tribunal claims.

His work covers all areas of employment law including:

  • Process mapping workplace restructures for employers (particularly complex exercises which involve large scale redundancies and which have an international dimension, cross border TUPE transfers and changes to terms and conditions of employment).
  • Advising on commercially sensitive HR issues on behalf of businesses, some of which have attracted media attention (including management of long term disciplinary and grievance procedures, exit management of senior executives and advice regarding the dismissal of a Premier League football manager and coaching staff).
  • Tribunal claims and advocacy: he is an accomplished tribunal advocate with a track record of successfully defending high value claims, which pose serious reputational risk to clients.
  • He has in-house experience having undertaken a secondment with PepsiCo's Legal Team in London as UK Employment Counsel.

His experience in international employment matters includes:

  • Project management of cross border TUPE transfers (i.e. transfer of staff from a UK ship management company to US, Belgian and Greek companies).
  • Project management of global restructure exercise (global manufacturing company making redundancies across its businesses in UK, US, Middle East, Poland and Turkey) co-ordinating advice and approach with international lawyers.
  • Co-ordinating advice and approach with international lawyers in relation to the dismissal of staff based outside of the UK (including US, France, Spain, Poland, Norway, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Sri Lanka, Singapore and the Philippines) and production of overseas settlement agreements.
  • Co-ordinating advice from international lawyers for the production of bi-lingual employment documentation (contracts, consultancy agreements) in France, Italy, Norway, Poland, Thailand.