Katy Horner

Katy specialises in employment law and has over 18 years’ experience advising clients across a range of sectors.

Katy has built strong relationships with her clients by providing both operational and strategic advice to them on their strategic and operational HR issues. She advises and represents clients in relation to high value claims for disability, race, sex and age discrimination. Katy's expertise also extends to advising on significant sickness absence issues and sensitive situations where there has been a breakdown of relationships.

Katy provides practical advice to clients on all aspects of complex reorganisation and restructuring programmes. She works closely with clients on the implementation of redundancy exercises and changing terms and conditions of employment, including providing advice on consultation with trade unions. Katy regularly provides training to organisations on a variety of employment matters as well as providing in-house training to clients.

Relevant experience includes advising organisations on managing issues such as:

• A sensitive and challenging whistleblowing case, which involved the practical management of a difficult employee, and reputation management given that the public nature of the concerns raised and successfully defending a claim for interim relief made by the individual following the termination of her employment.
• The calculation of holiday pay for workers on zero or annualised hours contracts to minimise the impact on the organisation given the potential for claims from a large number of staff, dating back many years.
• Large scale changes to terms and conditions of employment for staff including tactical advice on how to approach collective and individual consultation, as well as dealing with issues such as grievances and terminating and re-issuing contracts.
• The successful implementation of organisational change ranging from service provision changes under TUPE to partnership working to merger, dealing with advice on contractual change information and consultation and managing collective and individual grievances.

Katy has been recognised in legal directories as being "an excellent provider of high-quality employment law advice” and as inspiring “confidence with her conscientious and intelligent advice”.

In addition, Katy is a member of the Employment Lawyers Association and the Industrial Law Society.