Devon-Lee joined JMW in January 2023 as an Associate in the Employment Law Department.
She is experienced in advising employers on employment contracts and senior executive service agreements and exits, HR policies, restrictive covenants, redundancy exercises, the employment aspects of mergers and acquisitions, grievance and disciplinary proceedings and other day-to-day HR queries. Her contentious experience encompasses advising on employment tribunal claims ranging in complexity including discrimination and whistleblowing claims.
Devon-Lee is qualified as both a Solicitor of England and Wales and as an Attorney of the High Courts of South Africa. She completed her LLB (with distinction) at the University of Pretoria before training at one of South Africa’s top law firms. She has practised employment law in the UK since 2019. Prior to joining JMW, Devon-Lee worked at a large regional firm and has also spent 6 months on secondment at a global facilities management company of over 35,000 UK employees where she gained invaluable experience in running employment tribunal claims in house.
She enjoys presenting training sessions to clients on a number of topics including legislation/case law updates and equality and diversity and endeavours to do so in an easy-to-understand, clear manner without complicated legalese.
Recent examples of how Devon-Lee has supported clients include:
- running a mass settlement agreement process involving circa 5000 individuals employed in the travel industry. The project called for various short deadlines to be met over a 3 month period;
- delivering bespoke training sessions to the employees of a client on equality and diversity with a particular focus on bullying and harassment. Case studies were used to highlight, among other things, the fine line between “banter” and bullying in the workplace;
- assisting with a redundancy exercise affecting 45 employees, arising from a site closure for a client in the banking industry; and
- advising on and successfully defending a race discrimination claim where an employee had attempted to provoke her manager whilst video recording on her mobile phone.