Louise Bloomfield

Louise specialises in employment law, and also industrial relations issues.

She has many years’ experience advising clients across a range of sectors including household name clients in the retail and hospitality sector, as well as significant businesses in the insurance, logistics and health care sectors. Her key clients include many household name businesses, major corporates, and globally recognised insurance businesses. Louise also heads our national insurance EPL practice.

Louise regularly advises businesses on their most sensitive employment law issues, including senior hires and exits, restrictive covenant disputes, trade union matters, complex discrimination and whistleblowing issues, and also effecting change management. She is able to draw on her experience of lengthy secondments at both Asda and Royal Mail to ensure that her advice and support, and that of the teams she leads, is business and commercially focussed.

Relevant experience includes advising:

• Royal Mail on industrial relations issues, in particular in relation to strike activity, including wildcat action. Louise was part of the team which was successful in the High Court and Court of Appeal in preventing the CWU calling its members out on national strike around Christmas and the General Election 2019.
• A global restaurant chain on all of its UK employment law issues, which includes supporting its People Team on a daily basis on issues ranging from disciplinaries and grievances to more strategic matters such as senior exits, TUPE transfers and changing terms and conditions.
• Strategic advice to major insurers on hot topic issues such as COVID-19 vaccinations and testing and the impact on employers/employees, and also employment status concerns arising from evolving case law relating to the gig economy.

Louise is recognised as a leading lawyer by Chambers and Partners, and Legal 500 which state:

“Louise Bloomfield is a dynamic practitioner with considerable expertise handling sensitive and complex race and disability discrimination, whistle-blowing and unfair dismissal claims. She also has notable experience assisting clients with industrial relations. "She is technically really good and has a really strong client base." (Chambers and Partners 2021)

“Practice head Louise Bloomfield and senior associate Anjali Sharma maintain close ties with insurance companies as part of the firm’s EPL work which includes acting in a stream of whistleblowing and discrimination cases before the Employment Tribunal."

Industrial relations work is another area of expertise for the group; Bloomfield and associate Sam Proffitt recently obtained numerous high profile injunctions for industrial action proposals before the High Court” (Legal 500 2021)