Legal consultation at London

Practice Areas

I have considerable experience in real estate disputes both in relation to actual litigation and, more frequently, working with clients to manage their portfolios and avoid disputes. My experience includes all landlord and tenant matters, as well as real property matters such as easements, nuisance and restrictive covenants.

Practice Areas

Julian co-founded Harris Hagan with John Hagan in May 2004. He is recognised globally as a leading gambling lawyer, advising many of the world’s largest land-based and online gambling businesses as well as start-ups, investors and leading international law firms. Julian has extensive experience advising on legal classification, operating licence applications, casino competitions and premises licensing, change of corporate control and specialist regulatory matters relating to mergers and acquisitions. He also advises on regulatory compliance assessments and investigations, and licence reviews.

Julian is recognised by Chambers UK as “extremely good at dealing with regulators” and in Chambers Global “draws wide-ranging praise as “amazing,” “phenomenal” and “a legend” in the field.”

Practice Areas

Sally is a partner and Head of Employment at Raworths. She has a wide range of experience in all aspects of employment law. She regularly guides clients through disciplinary and grievance issues, redundancy and re-structure processes and handles a wide range of Employment Tribunal claims.

Practice Areas

Fudia Smartt is an expert employment lawyer with almost 20 years’ experience in advising employees and employers on all aspects of employment law in highly regarded firms. In particular, she has expertise in advising senior executives in regulated sectors on complex discrimination, equal pay, whistleblowing and unfair dismissal claims; regularly securing significant six-figure settlements for her clients. As a qualified DISC and MBTI practitioner, she is also praised for her strong emotional intelligence.

She works as a facilitator for Byrne Dean (which is a workplace consultancy mainly comprised of former employment lawyers), principally working with large professional services firms across the City. Her work in providing training on matters such as diversity, inclusion, unconscious bias, allyship, intersectionality, office politics, and employment law for managers, which compliments her skill-set as an employment lawyer in acting for individuals and businesses alike.

Fudia Smartt is also a sought-after public speaker who regularly gives talks for organisations such as the Westminster Employment Forum, Business Forum International and MBL Seminars on a range of employment matters. Her commentary is also regularly sought by publications such as the Financial Times and she has been interviewed on TV shows such as Jeremy Vine.

Practice Areas

Head of the Employment team, Sarah advises a diverse range of organisations and businesses, providing commercial and pragmatic advice on people issues. Described in Legal 100 as 'passionate, driven and determined', Sarah goes over and above for her clients applying her practical, solutions-oriented mindset to every situation.

Delivered in a straight talking, honest and direct manner, Sarah advises senior HR professionals, boards and business owners on all elements of their employment strategy with particular experience in supporting evolving organisations facing change either in terms of scaling up or down their workforce or changing how they do business.

Sarah’s skill is in identifying business threats and issues and providing a holistic, pragmatic solution (which may comprise of multiple disciplines) to achieve clients’ commercial objectives and manages the implementation of her recommendations, focusing on adding value and being proactive wherever possible.

Practice Areas

Riffat Yaqub is a Partner in the Personal Injury team, specialising in high-value claims involving spinal cord injury, brain damage and serious orthopaedic injuries resulting in amputations and fatalities. She is a hugely talented claimant personal injury solicitor with a calm, empathetic and measured approach who gets results.

Riffat is known for adopting a client-focussed, holistic approach whilst being committed and a fierce litigator. She is not afraid to take cases to trial when necessary. She acts for vulnerable clients and is a strong advocate for securing early rehabilitation, ensuring her clients can get their lives back on track as quickly as possible.

Throughout her career of 26 years, Riffat has developed a formidable reputation for consistently achieving strong results for her clients who have suffered serious life changing injuries arising from road traffic accidents, workplace accidents, accidents in public places and medical accidents. She is dedicated to her clients’ wellbeing to meet their every care, treatment need and secure their future financially.

Riffat works effectively with case managers, medics and professionals to achieve the right outcome.

Riffat has pursued a number of high-profile cases involving foreign nationals who have been injured in the UK, including a Ukrainian national injured in a workplace accident, three UAE nationals who were viciously attacked whilst staying at a London hotel and a French national who suffered devastating life-changing injuries after being thrown from a viewing gallery.

Riffat has set up what is perhaps the first community based neuro rehabilitation package for her brain injured client in Ukraine where there is a complete dearth of brain injury services. When war broke out, Riffat was determined to help her client, to return to the UK and worked tirelessly to get UK authorities to grant visas to her client, his family, and his Ukrainian based community rehabilitation team.

Whilst running her complex catastrophic caseload, Riffat also leads and co-ordinates support work with CBIT. Attending meetings with caseworkers, events and fundraising. Riffat is a confident public speaker and regularly presents on HJA’s London Legal Podcast and Facebook Live sessions with CBIT and other groups.

Riffat works closely with junior HJA colleagues to provide mentoring and coaching.

Riffat works closely with charities including CBIT, Brake, Headway and others.

PROFESSIONAL TESTIMONIALS

Dr Jackson, Clinical Neuropsychologist

“Without reservation You -Riffat have been outstanding in such unusual and challenging circumstances, with unselfishness, resilience and humanitarianism. It has been a pleasure to work with you, being creative in providing an effective rehabilitation programme partly remotely in the Ukraine. After the onset of war, you were unnerving in finding the best way to arrange the evacuation of your severely brain injured client and his family to the UK. In my 30 years of medico-legal work I have rarely seen a solicitor with such concern for their clients and the capacity to work so insightfully with the Neuro-rehabilitation services.”

Dr Mark Holloway, Senior Brain Injury Case Manager

“Throughout the whole process Riffat has sought to understand the complexities faced, she has been a committed advocate for her client and his family, and, whilst rightly holding us all to account, has recognised just how difficult this has been. She has liaised collegiately and robustly with her defendant counterpart and has ensured we have a shared vision of what we aim to achieve”.

William Latimer-Sayer KC, Cloisters

“Riffat cleverly negotiated with the Defendant’s representatives to make further payments under the Rehab Code, which therefore are not subject to the contributory negligence discount.

Her dedication and commitment to the client has been truly inspirational, and we are now working to secure the necessary expert evidence to quantify and resolve the claim.”

Beth Bartlett, Clinical Manager, Harrison Associates

“I worked with Riffat on the case of a young woman who sustained life changing injury to her upper limb. Whilst her tenacity and resilience helped maximise her rehabilitation and recovery potential, having an equally tenacious and resilient solicitor fighting her corner was just as important: Riffat really supported both her client and me as the case manager enabling the young lady to access rehabilitation tailored to her needs, as expediently as possible. Riffat has a terrific manner, is very innovative, calm, emphatic, caring and an extremely bright capable lawyer who is very client focussed. Working so collaboratively with Riffat made the whole rehabilitation process so much easier, not to mention such a pleasure!”

Graham Lynch, Defendant Solicitor

Riffat adopted a pragmatic and collaborative approach throughout the process including early notification of the claim, dialogue in relation to liability resolution, rehabilitation, quantum evidence and overall settlement. Throughout I found Riffat to be a pragmatic, skilled negotiator. She was a formidable opponent, very determined, who clearly cared for her client. Riffat was very approachable, highly experienced litigator”.