A paralegal has been awarded more than £100,000 in compensation for discrimination after the firm she was working for blocked her dream to become a solicitor.
Ms F Kaiser began working for Khans Solicitors for a second time in 2019 and stated that she was “keen to become a qualified solicitor”.
She had discussed the firm employing her under a training contract with the partners and was offered one during a meeting with them in March 2019.
Disability discrimination
At the time, she had been declared bankrupt after she divorced her husband and a business they co-owned was dissolved.
She suggested to the partners it might be prudent to “sort” the issue with the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) and for that reason they should postpone her training contract and employ her as a paralegal in the interim.
She was then engaged on a contract of between £1050 and £1100 a month. This amounted to £8.21 an hour for a 35-hour week as a caseworker, the relevant national minimum wage at the time. However, she often worked more than the contracted hours, including weekends.
She won her tribunal claim last year for disability discrimination, sex discrimination, breach of contract and unfair dismissal and has now been awarded £109,020.64 in a remedy judgment.
According to the remedy judgment, the firm “never paid her those wages, although it is our judgment that she worked in excess of those hours”.
Kaiser was also dealing with a chronic pain condition that required her to take frequent medication, as well as a diagnosis of stress and anxiety which sometimes resulted in her suffering from palpitations.
She was later diagnosed with arthritis and glaucoma, and while the firm was happy to grant time off for her to attend clinics the tribunal heard that requests for reasonable adjustments were not always taken seriously.
She continued to work in and out of the office during the Covid pandemic but was signed off with stress in December 2020. In early 2021, she took further sickness absence due to a Covid infection and then a diagnosis of cervical spondylosis.
In February 2021, one of the partners suggested she should stop working for the firm on a PAYE basis as “the business could not afford the claimant”, but that she could continue to work if it was on a self-employed basis. She refused the offer and was sent a letter of dismissal.
In calculating injury to feelings in the remedy judgment, Employment Judge Jones said: “For her part, despite her disabilities and the pain and discomfort that she felt most of the time; the claimant worked hard, did everything she was told to do, went to the office on weekends and worked late into the evenings, hoping that this would all lead to her eventually achieving her goal of becoming a solicitor.
“The claimant…inevitably suffered a sense of injury to herself and her sense of wellbeing and suffered from a deterioration in her mental health, as a result of the discrimination and the discriminatory dismissal.
“As a result of the treatment and her experiences at the respondent, she has given up her dream of becoming a solicitor.”
The tribunal awarded £25,000 for injury to feelings and £5,000 for aggravated damages. Compensation for contractual losses including loss of earnings pre- and post-dismissal, unpaid wages and unpaid sick pay totalled more than £45,000.
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