A high-earning City partner has won his claim for unfair dismissal after a tribunal found there had been no redundancy situation identified by the firm.
Allan Reason had been dismissed by international practice MacCarthy Tértrault last year after the firm suggested he had failed to meet his billing target for four years in a row.
But an employment tribunal found that while the firm had discussed reducing his salary and billing target, these talks had not included redundancy discussions before Reason was dismissed.
Employment Judge Anthony, sitting at the London Central tribunal, said the firm had failed to prove that Reason was made redundant because work had fallen away. As a result, there was no fair reason for his dismissal.
Reason had joined the firm on a self-employed basis in 2013 and started work as an income partner in 2018 in the London office, working in domestic and international commercial litigation and arbitration. He was on an annual salary of £320,000 at the point of dismissal.
The firm argued that a redundancy situation existed from December 2022. Reason had been set a target of 1,400 billable hours a year but there had been insufficient litigation work for him to meet this.
Managing partner Robert Brant met Reason in December 2022 for an informal discussion over drinks at the Coq d’Argent restaurant in the Square Mile, suggesting to him that he could reduce his salary to £110,000 and his target hours to 460. The judge found there was no discussion at this meeting about Reason being made redundant.
Reason said that this offer was continuously offered until the end of March 2023, even after the inception of the redundancy consultation, showing there was no reduced requirement for litigation work.
The tribunal heard that in Reason’s annual review for 2022, there was no warning about underbilling and nothing to suggest that Brant anticipated a downturn in litigation work.
In his evidence to the tribunal, Brant tried to suggest that Reason should have taken it as a ‘stark warning’ that his salary had not increased for some years. The judge said it would not have been obvious from his employment contract that a salary freeze should be taken by Reason as a redundancy warning.
The judge found nothing to suggest from the 2022 review or otherwise that the firm had any issues regarding Reason’s ability to build client or colleague relationships, and she rejected Brant’s oral evidence that this was a cause for concern.
She concluded that redundancy was first articulated in March 2023 when it became clear to the firm it could not agree with Reason a variation on his employment contract.
‘The only information the respondent has relied on is the claimant’s successive years of underbilling,’ added the judge. ‘I have already found that these were matters which the respondent was fully appraised of when the respondent sought to negotiate terms with the claimant in December 2022.’
A further hearing will be set to determine the issue of remedy.
