Neill Thomas ThomasMansfield Employment Law

Neill Thomas

Managing Partner, Co-Founder

01892 335991 / 07801 012 428
[email protected]
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Neill is Managing Partner and co-founder of Thomas Mansfield Solicitors.

Neill completed an MBA and followed a business career before studying for a law degree. He took the Law Society finals at Chester College of Law and received a diploma in Advanced Litigation from Nottingham University. While training at a firm in Kent, he established an employment law department at their Ashford office. Neill qualified as a solicitor in 2000 and worked for a large regional law practice before a Top 100 law firm headhunted him to join their team in London.

In 2004, Neill founded Thomas Mansfield Solicitors together with Jonathan Mansfield to practice employment law. With offices in London, Kent and Surrey, the firm has expanded to also advise on family law and private client law matters.

Experience

While managing the firm, Neill occasionally provides top level strategic advice to large organisations on complex employment law issues and highly sensitive litigation cases.

Among the highlights of such work is a case in which he advised a national recruitment company about highly sensitive claims of whistleblowing and sexual harassment against its managing director. A very litigious firm of solicitors represented the employee in the Employment Tribunal but Neill persuaded the other party to withdraw their claims early on. Another positive that the client desired was that no negative publicity came out about the case.

In another recent example Neill advised a national construction company on backdated holiday pay claims raised by a group of ninety employees who transferred to the company under TUPE. After several interlocutory tribunal hearings Neill settled the case for less than the total value of the claims and before the final merits hearing.

Neill also has extensive experience advising companies, individual employees and teams on post-termination restrictive covenants in the High Court. He was one of the first employment lawyers to successfully appeal a High Court confidentiality super-injunction, which prevented the client from issuing proceedings in the employment tribunals.

When working on employee matters, Neill normally advises directors, senior managers, business owners and shareholders. In a recent example, he helped a Group Finance Director of a FTSE 100 company to leave the organisation with a very attractive package of salary, bonus, shares and share options.

Neill represented care worker John Shannon in the landmark Supreme Court case of Royal Mencap Society v Tomlinson-Blake and John Shannon v Jaikishan and Prithee Rampersad (Trading as Clifton House Residential Home) UK SC 2018/0161. Widely reported in the press, the case was about whether some of the lowest paid care workers in the country should be entitled to the National Minimum Wage while carrying out sleep-in duties. The case was highly sensitive and had potentially wide-ranging implications for the care home industry, the legal profession and those paid the lowest.

Together with Jonathan Mansfield and with the help of the expanding team, Neill devised a range of multimedia training programmes used by such organisations as ACAS, the Department for International Development, the Police Force of Northern Ireland, Del Monte, Gleneagles Hotel, HSS Hire Shops, Nationwide Auto Rentals, among others.

Areas of expertise

Provision of top-level strategic advice to large employers, business owners, shareholders, senior employees and teams of employees on complex employment law matters, Employment Tribunal claims and landmark High Court cases.

Memberships