Sylwena Sempa > Shoosmiths LLP > Manchester, England > Lawyer Profile

Sylwena is a Principal Associate within our Commercial Litigation team, since qualification in 2005 she has acted for a diverse range of clients.  Her experience covers a wide range of general commercial disputes as well as niche areas of pensions’ litigation, High Court employment cases and phone hacking litigation.

Sylwena tailors her approach to complement her client’s requirements and offers pragmatic and commercially astute advice from the outset.  She recognises the importance of balancing commercial realities against legal principles and therefore seeks to understand the commercial context of each dispute in order to frame her advice on tactics and strategy generally.

Examples of Sylwena’s work include:

• acting for an employer in relation to its successful Part 8 claim for declaratory relief that the transfer of members within a sectionalised scheme from the DB to DC section would not trigger a potential multi-million pound section 75 debt;
• acting in a £1.74m breach of trust claim against a solicitor’s firm following a third party’s fraudulent misappropriation of loan funds;
• acting for a leading provider of lease finance products in connection with its multi-million pound claim for damages following systemic breaches of multiple contracts;
• advising on the defence of a High Court employment restrictive covenant/interim injunction case, which commenced with us successfully defending the application for springboard injunctive relief assisted by extensive supporting forensic evidence.  The matter subsequently settled on confidential terms;
• acting for various celebrities in relation to their phone-hacking claims;
• acting for an Independent Trustee of a pension scheme in relation to its High Court application for declaratory relief concerning the validity or otherwise of the scheme’s purported winding up, cessation of accruals, equalisation and the validity of the Actuary’s GN19 certificate; and
• successfully using alternative dispute resolution to achieve commercially attractive settlements.