Ed Cotton

Ed is an employment law specialist and recognised as a Leading Individual in Legal 500. He is a Partner within the Employment team which is ranked Tier 1 in Legal 500.

Ed has over 20 years’ experience as an employment lawyer, advising employer clients on a wide range of strategic, complex and sensitive employment law issues, but also on business-as-usual matters. He has particular experience dealing with restrictive covenant issues and team moves, both in the High Court and arbitration.

Ed regularly advises on executive appointments and terminations, the defence of litigation in Employment Tribunals, reorganisation and redundancy and TUPE issues relating to corporate transactions and outsourcing.

He acts for a range of clients including retailers, professional services firms, recruitment businesses and clients in the manufacturing, transport and leisure sectors.

Ed qualified in 1996.

Jurisdiction: England and Wales

Recent Experience

• Acting for Boohoo on the appointment of their new CEO;
• Acting for a PLC recruitment business on the enforcement of post termination restrictive covenants, including obtaining injunctive relief;
• Advising a manufacturing business on a large scale restructuring and redundancy process;
• Acting for a bank negotiating complex TUPE provisions in outsourcing agreement;
• Acting for a retail client in the defence of multiple race discrimination/unfair dismissal claims;
• Acting for five individual defendants who were former employees of a recruitment agency as well as acting for their new employer, a competitor recruitment agency. The claimant alleged that the individual defendants were subject to enforceable non-competition covenants which precluded them from working for their new employer and sought an interim injunction preventing them from continuing to do so. Before Mr Justice Snowden, the Vice Chancellor of the County Palatine of Lancaster, TLT were successful in dismissing the application with a costs order made in favour of the defendants. [Affinity Workforce Solutions Ltd v McCann [2019] EWHC 2829 (Ch)]