Iris Ferber KC

2005 | Silk 2023
020 7831 0222 | [email protected]

Iris Ferber KC

2005 | Silk 2023
020 7831 0222 | [email protected]

Employment Law

Iris Ferber KC conducts the full range of Employment Tribunal and appellate work, acting regularly for both employees and employers. She provides advice, and undertakes drafting work, in all aspects of Employment litigation.

Iris works with a wide range of employers, from public sector and national companies with thousands of employees, to small businesses and individuals.

She also represents claimants in complex, high value, and high-profile claims.

Iris is particularly sought after in cases requiring the handling of vulnerable parties and witnesses. Her clients often instruct her in the early stages of litigation, when she can advise not only on the shaping of the legal issues in their dispute, but also on procedure, practicalities, and litigation tactics.

Iris provides Employment Law training to solicitors and companies: both seminars on current legal issues, and practical workshops on employee management and litigation.

Notable Cases

Borg-Neal v Lloyds Bank plc: In 2023 and 2024, Iris acted for the Respondent in this very widely-reported case of a bank manager, dismissed for the language he had used in a race awareness training session, who claimed unfair dismissal and disability discrimination.
Rahman v Ford Retail Ltd [2023] EAT 55: Iris represented the Respondent in an appeal against a Tribunal’s refusal of permission to amend a claim, which grappled with the difficult question of how much a Tribunal is required to do, in order to understand a litigant in person’s case, when their ET1 is lengthy, verbose and difficult to understand.
Hassan v BBC [2023] EAT 48: Iris represented the Appellant in an appeal against a Tribunal’s case management decision, which had significantly narrowed her claims by reference to documents produced after the close of pleadings, instead of focusing on the nature and extent of her claims as set out in her ET1.
Lasdas v Vanquis Bank [2022] EAT 198: Iris represented the Respondent in an appeal against the making of a deposit order in a race discrimination claim, based on the characterisation of the claim as one of direct discrimination rather than indirect discrimination.
Kids Company v Smith [2018] IRLR 484: Iris represented over 100 former employees of the charity Kids Company, seeking protective awards for the failure to consult them on redundancy before the charity’s collapse. Iris won at the ET, and then successfully resisted an appeal to the EAT (resulting in a leading appellate judgment on the “special circumstances” defence in protective award claims).
Hartley v Foreign and Commonwealth Office Services [2016] ICR D17: Iris acted for the Appellant at the EAT, establishing the principle that in a harassment claim, the perception of the harasser about the alleged act of harassment is irrelevant to the application of the correct statutory test.

Business Law

Iris Ferber KC has a Commercial litigation practice focused principally on contractual disputes involving misrepresentation, undue influence, duress and fraud, as well as professional negligence.

Her Commercial practice also crosses over with her Employment practice in disputes relating to post-termination restrictive covenants, where Iris is valued both for her ability to provide practical, strategic advice which avoids litigation and – when a case does proceed to Court – for her exceptional Courtroom presence and “forensic, detailed and devastating cross-examination”.

Iris delivers very popular workshops, both online and in person to solicitors and clients, on all aspects of restrictive covenant disputes, contractual disputes and professional negligence.

Notable Cases

During 2024 and 2025, Iris has been leading Jonathan Davies of 42BR in long-running High Court commercial litigation, on behalf of a company whose directors set up a rival business, resulting in claims of breach of directors’ duties, breach of covenant, misuse of confidential information, and a number of other heads of claim.
During 2023, 2024 and 2025, Iris has been instructed in a number of disputes, by both corporations and local authorities, involving serial vexatious litigants. Iris has drafted pleadings and submissions in the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court, and has advised on tactics for handling and resolving such cases.
In 2022, Iris was instructed by the London Borough of Newham to obtain winding up orders against over 20 insolvent companies, which had been involved in the multi-million pound development of the Royal Albert Dock. Iris later successfully resisted a hard-fought application by those companies to rescind the winding up orders, involving technical questions of the service of the winding up petitions.

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Iris Ferber KC

Iris Ferber KC

Employment Law

Business Law

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