Tribunal: Disability claim struck out
A solicitor can continue a claim that he was unfairly dismissed for blowing the whistle about biased work allocation practices at a law firm, a judge has ruled.
Though he rejected Irwell Law’s strike-out application for this, Employment Judge Cuthbert in Manchester did strike out a complaint of disability discrimination based on a failure to make reasonable adjustments.
Mr M Broomhead worked for Irwell Law, the Manchester-based alternative business structure set up by well-known employment law and HR services company Peninsula, for a year to August 2023.
He claimed he was dismissed for making a protected disclosure after telling the firm’s compliance officer for legal practice that another solicitor had arranged with the trainee who allocated work to give them the higher-paying cases, leaving the rest – which Mr Broomhead described as “the rubbish” – for him and the other fee-earners.
The employment law solicitor was dismissed with three months’ notice at the meeting, but a week later summarily dismissed on the grounds of gross misconduct, specifically insubordination and breach of confidentiality.
Mr Broomhead argued that those grounds were fabricated and there was a public interest element in his disclosure because it concerned the conduct of a solicitor. He contends that the unfair allocation was because of his age and disability (diabetes).
The debate over the strike-out application focused on whether, assuming the solicitor subjectively believed that he had disclosed information which was in the public interest, such a belief was reasonable.
Counsel for Irwell Law argued that it “affected a single sole person in a private dispute in a modest provincial law firm”.
Judge Cuthbert said: “Taking the claimant’s case at its highest, as I was obliged to do for the purposes of the application, I concluded that the matters about which he complained and the context in which he did so were such that they might be capable of being objectively viewed as being in the public interest, when it came to standards of behaviour and conduct within the legal profession.”
As such, it was not a question which could be resolved summarily.
“In short, the [law firm] did not demonstrate that there was either little or no reasonable prospect of the claimant establishing that the alleged disclosure was, objectively, in the public interest.”
But the judge went on to find that Mr Broomhead had no reasonable prospect of being able to establish that he was placed “at a substantial disadvantage, due to his disability of diabetes”, by the alleged approach to allocating cases.
The judge refused each side’s application for costs against the other.
This is one of two live claims that Mr Broomhead has against Irwell Law – the other includes complaints of direct age discrimination, age-related harassment, victimisation, wrongful dismissal and holiday pay, which are due to proceed to a final hearing.
Mr Broomhead failed in an application for interim relief last year because he failed to correctly name the law firm respondent and the judge also said the evidence indicated that the dismissal was for performance issues. The solicitor was ordered to pay Irwell Law costs of £3,000.
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