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15 January 2026
Categories: Movers & Shakers , Profession
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Watershed—Rob Elliott

Employment firm expands capability with experienced hire

Watershed has appointed Rob Elliott to its growing team, strengthening its employment law offering. Elliott brings more than 20 years’ experience advising employers across sectors including government, retail, health, hospitality, logistics, professional services, digital and higher education.

He joins Watershed as an employment lawyer following a career spanning consultancy, private practice and in-house roles, including positions at Croner Consulting, Qdos Consulting, Bray & Bray Solicitors, Abbey HR/AHR, Firstsource and Serco. His work covers complex investigations, disciplinary and grievance procedures, discrimination matters, restructures, redundancies, TUPE, senior exits and employment tribunal defence.

Victoria Young, managing director at Watershed, said Elliott brings ‘extensive respondent-side experience and a calm, solutions focused approach’, adding that his background reflects ‘the way we operate, close to clients, pragmatic and involved in the real decision-making’.

Elliott said Watershed offers ‘something genuinely different’, highlighting ‘high-impact work, autonomy and the chance to build meaningful relationships with clients’, and said he was looking forward to supporting clients with ‘practical, commercial, and outcomes-focused employment law advice’.

MOVERS & SHAKERS

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Slater Heelis—Will Newman & Lucy Spilsbury

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NEWS
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Secondments, disciplinary procedures and appeal chaos all feature in a quartet of recent rulings. Writing in NLJ this week, Ian Smith, barrister and emeritus professor of employment law at UEA, examines how established principles are being tested in modern disputes
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A High Court ruling involving the Longleat estate has exposed the fault line between modern family building and historic trust drafting. Writing in NLJ this week, Charlotte Coyle, director and family law expert at Freeths, examines Cator v Thynn [2026] EWHC 209 (Ch), where trustees sought approval to modernise trusts that retain pre-1970 definitions of ‘child’, ‘grandchild’ and ‘issue’
Fresh proposals to criminalise ‘nudification’ apps, prioritise cyberflashing and non-consensual intimate images, and even ban under-16s from social media have reignited debate over whether the Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA 2023) is fit for purpose. Writing in NLJ this week, Alexander Brown, head of technology, media and telecommunications, and Alexandra Webster, managing associate, Simmons & Simmons, caution against reactive law-making that could undermine the Act’s ‘risk-based and outcomes-focused’ design
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