Sophia Berry > Chambers of Gavin Mansfield KC > London, England > Barrister Profile

Chambers of Gavin Mansfield KC
Littleton Chambers
3 KING'S BENCH WALK NORTH, TEMPLE
LONDON
EC4Y 7HR
England
Sophia Berry photo

Work Department

Sophia specialises in employment and commercial law.

Position

Sophia has also been instructed on injunction applications in the High Court recently, both in her own right and as junior counsel. These include urgent applications resulting from breach of restrictive covenants and fiduciary duties and misuse of confidential information as well as an application to restrain threatened industrial action (Argos v Unite the Union [2017]). Sophia also has a keen interest in whistleblowing, equal pay and discrimination claims and has appeared in the Employment Appeal Tribunal on numerous occasions. Most recently, she successfully defended an important appeal relating to time limits in discrimination claims (Edomobi v La Retraite RC Girls School [2016] UKEAT 0180_16_1511).

Career

Called 2012; Initially qualified as a Solicitor at Linklaters LLP in 2011

Memberships

  • Employment Lawyers Association (ELA)
  • Commercial Bar Association (Combar)
  • Chancery Bar Association (ChBA)

Education

Sophia read law at Cambridge University and has a Masters degree in law from King’s College London. She was awarded the Dickson Poon School of Law Prize for attaining the highest marks of any student on the Masters course and the PwC Prize for the best dissertation written by a Masters student.

  • LLM, King’s College London – Distinction
  • BA in Law, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge – 1

Lawyer Rankings

London Bar > Employment

(Leading Juniors)Ranked: Tier 3

Sophia Berry – Littleton Chambers

A strong set for employment work‘, Littleton Chambers has a solid track record in representing respondent clients in a wide range of challenging cases. In the Court of Appeal, David Reade KC and Grahame Anderson acted for the respondents in a test case on the rights of agency workers to access permanent employment opportunities (Kocur v Angard Staffing Limited and Royal Mail Group). Also in the Court of Appeal, Anderson and Nicholas Siddall KC acted in Kong v Gulf International Bank Ltd, a landmark case involving the scope of the distinction between a whistleblowing disclosure and the conduct related to its manner, known as the separability principle. Over in the Supreme Court, Mohinderpal Sethi KC and Sophia Berry appeared in Basfar v Wong, the first case to be granted permission to leapfrog appeal directly to the Supreme Court from the EAT. The case involved a claim brought against a serving diplomat by a domestic worker, who alleged that she had been trafficked to the UK and her employment conditions constituted modern slavery; the Supreme Court ruled that diplomatic immunity could not defeat such a claim as it fell under the commercial activity exception.