Western Circuit
Old Square Chambers’ members regularly act across a wide range of employment cases, with work in high-profile and confidential investigations increasing. Oliver Segal KC and Stuart Brittenden KC successfully represented union workers in the Supreme Court in Tesco Stores Ltd v USDAW, a long-running dispute regarding its use of a "fire and rehire" strategy to remove a pay protection from pre-2007 employees. Ben Cooper KC and Spencer Keen have recently acted in the widely-publicised For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers case regarding the definition of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2024, a very significant case that will continue to have an ongoing impact in the wider employment law sphere. Cooper KC - for the barrister - and Ijeoma Omambala KC (for the defendant campaign group) are on opposite sides of Bailey v Stonewall Equality Ltd, a case involves issues of the provisions for instructing, causing or inducing discrimination.
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Profile
Position
Spencer specialises in employment, human rights, EU and commercial law. He has extensive experience acting for both corporate clients and individuals at first instance and appellate levels. He is particularly well known for injunction proceedings in the High Court (concerning employee competition, restraints of trade and confidentiality) and also for acting in complex disability discrimination cases. Examples of recent cases include: Bamieh v European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo [2017] EAT which considered whether an international organisation had personality for the purposes of domestic law and the effect of Article 10 ECHR on the territorial jurisdiction of an English Employment Tribunal; Unison v Lord Chancellor [2017] where Spencer appeared for the Equality and Human Rights Commission in the judicial review of the government’s decision to impose fees in the employment tribunal (with Mark Whitcombe and led by Michael Ford QC).
Career
Publications:
Disability Discrimination in Employment (OUP) 2009 and numerous articles for the New Law Journal.
Spencer has a personal website at www.spencerkeen.co.uk
Memberships
ELA
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Testimonials
Collated independently by Legal 500 research team.
- ‘Spencer has exceptional attention to detail and has a polite yet direct approach to his advocacy.'