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07 November 2019 / Ian Smith
Issue: 7863 / Categories: Features , Employment , Discrimination
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Employment law brief: 7 November 2019

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In this month’s employment brief, Ian Smith raises a glass to legal privilege in the face of pub gossip, & the Pandora’s Box opened by the recent whistle-blowing judgment
  • Judges can be ‘workers’.
  • No liability for third-party harassment.
  • Reversing the burden of proof in discrimination cases.

Dangerous places, London pubs. We might have benefited from Christopher Marlowe’s views on this, if he had not been murdered in one. What brought this to mind this month was a Court of Appeal decision (Curless v Shell International Ltd [2019] EWCA Civ 1710, [2019] All ER (D) 137 (Oct)) the facts of which occurred in that den of lawyers and other assorted ne’er-do-wells, the Old Bank of England pub near the law courts. The claimant in a case suddenly realised that a gaggle of lawyers just behind him were in fact talking about his case, from the other side. He was being faced with being ‘managed out’ by redundancy, but he thought it was for other, more dubious reasons.

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