Joan Pettingill

Expertise

Joan is a highly experienced expert in all areas of employment law.

Approachable, friendly, and unstuffy, Joan delivers winning solutions placing you in the very best negotiating position for your situation. She often advises on matters where reputational issues need careful management.

Joan is a trusted adviser both with ongoing strategic projects and with one-off matters and day-to-day ad hoc advice.

Having worked in-house in financial services, Joan has a very commercial no-nonsense approach that keeps the client’s objectives at the fore. She also advises leadership teams on their terms of entry to a business via an MBO or in relation to their exit arrangements including restrictive covenants.

Joan is extremely experienced in restructuring workforces, whether through redundancies, reorganisation of roles, changing job descriptions, contract terms, or changing working practices. She is experienced in all kinds of staff change management in particular where there are TUPE issues on business transfers including service provision changes.

Joan has particular experience assisting employers where there may be particularly difficult issues of suspected criminality such as fraud or potential abuse of others by staff or where there may be a safeguarding or professional disciplinary angle to also take into account.

Joan Advises

• SMEs through to plcs
• Charities & not for profits
• Care homes and healthcare businesses

Experience Highlights

• Advising on the relocation of a £20M manufacturing facility to the far east advising on all TUPE consultations, role reorganisations, contract variations, interview processes, and exit arrangements
• Successfully defending multiple union-backed employment tribunal claims for wages underpayments for an international engineering company
• Successfully advising a national retailer on trade union recognition issues of competing trade unions following a merger
• Advising a University in respect of trade union recognition negotiations as well as changes to contracts of employment and working practices after they’d restructured their business units
• On a service provision change, negotiating that TUPE did not apply thus releasing an engineering company from several million pounds of potential employee costs that they would otherwise have inherited
• Investigation of multi-million-pound theft by an employee resulting in the recovery of funds and conviction
• House of Lords case changing the law to allow children abused by care home managers to claim financial compensation

Career History

Previous Law Firms

• Wake Smith Solicitors (Director & Head of Employment & HR Services 2020–21)
• Lupton Fawcett LLP (Partner, Employment Law Team 2014–20)
• HLW Keeble Hawson LLP (now Knights plc) (Partner, Employment Law Team 2007–14)
• Gordons (Solicitor 2001–07)

Memberships

• Employment Lawyers Association

Education

• Northumbria University (LLB Law (Hons))
• Legal Practice Course

Other

• ILM qualified trainer
• ILM7 Executive Coach & Mentor
• Chair ⸺ Sheffield & South Yorkshire Advancing Leaders Peer Group

An experienced public speaker, Joan also frequently delivers training in employment law and is also an ILM7 executive coach and chairs a number of leadership peer groups.

Joan has been top-rated in Legal 500 for employment law, noted particularly for her TUPE expertise.