Michelle Bruce
Senior Associate
Corporate & Commercial Employment Law
Michelle started her legal career by training as a Barrister but chose to cross qualify as a Solicitor in 2012. Michelle’s first role was as a Paralegal at London firm Leigh Day & Co, principally working on multi-party equal pay claims against local authorities. Throughout her experience, Michelle has carved a niche in discrimination law, with a particular interest in claims of disability; race and gender (including gender identity) in particular.
Michelle undertakes a broad spectrum of both contentious and non-contentious work including drafting and negotiating contracts; drafting employment handbooks and/or staff policies; advising on redundancies as well as grievance and disciplinary issues. Michelle has also successfully negotiated both entry and exit packages for senior level employees, as well as advising employers on settlement agreements.
Michelle has represented a mix of both employee and employer clients at hearings in the employment tribunal in a range of including unfair dismissal; discrimination and unlawful deduction claims (amongst others).
Michelle has delivered training for the ELA on Settlement Agreements and in-house training on Gender Identity issues and Reasonable Adjustments for Disabled Employees.
More about Michelle…
What is the most daring/scariest thing you have done?
Learning how to eat and breathe fire. A close second was learning to ride a joust with the knights of Middle England this year.
Tell us something that not many people know about you?
I have a house full of rescue animals – including a rescue cat; two street dogs from Romania and another dog that I rescued whilst on holiday in Jordan in 2019. And despite sometimes needing to use a walking stick, I have been practising Taekwon-Do for over 2 years now and became a National Champion at the ITF National Competition in October 2023.
If you weren’t a lawyer or in your current profession, what would you be doing?
If I was not a lawyer, I would be a historian specialising in the Medieval or Tudor period.
Testimonials
