Síobhra Rush

With new business comes employment and, ineluctably, with employment comes employment law. Síobhra Rush is a partner in the employment, immigration and reward division and head of the Dublin office of Lewis Silkin Ireland.

The firm is based in the UK with offices in London, Oxford, Cardiff, Manchester, Leeds, and Hong Kong — and opened in Dublin in 2018 and Belfast in 2021, consolidating its two offices in the latter city’s Linenhall Street a year later.

Ms Rush says that Lewis Silkin was the first specialist and international employment law-specific firm to open in Dublin, which for her was an exciting prospect.

She had worked at Matheson for 11 years before transitioning to a more flexible role with Leman (now rebranded Ogier). During this time, she was approached by an old university friend, Séan Dempsey, who was based in Lewis Silkin’s London office. Together they established the firm’s Dublin office with Linda Hynes as managing associate (now partner).

“It was good to be opening a firm where employment law is very much front and centre of what we do, though we have trade mark attorneys and do have services on the brand protection side of the house as well,” Ms Rush says.

She adds that clients the firm works with on the employment front include in-house employment counsel who look after various jurisdictions and HR directors.

“There are very few HR directors in the companies we advise who are concerned only with Ireland or even the UK and Ireland, so we collaborate a lot with our overseas colleagues as part of the lus Laboris network with employment law firms who have a similar offering,” she explains.

The firm’s role, she says, is to provide as seamless a service as possible, ensuring that an HR director or in-house employment counsel gets the best advice, including commercial advice rather than “just sending them a long memo about what the law requires”.

Multinational clients include those in the technology sector plus retail and hospitality across several jurisdictions, with a client base that is 95 per cent employers.

Unlike some areas of corporate law which are extremely niche, employment law encompasses a wide range of issues that include redundancy, disciplinary proceedings, internal communications, holiday pay, allowances… and the number and complexity of those issues has grown substantially since Ms Rush qualified in 2001.

“We deal with working time cases, employee grievances and helping companies when they are scaling down with potential redundancy programmes among others,” she says.

“This area of the law has changed so much in the past six years that it’s a very exciting time because there’s a good mix of law and the human aspect, where you’re trying to help out with employee relations.”

The firm also fulfils a substantial amount of work around the gender pay gap and the Pay Transparency Directive which is due to be transposed into Irish law in June 2026.

“We’re also doing a lot of collectives work regarding trade unions, industrial relations and European Works Councils. And while we had the Protective Disclosures Act in 2014, that was amended in 2021 so there’s a lot of action in that area as well,” she notes.

“It’s not industry specific — it doesn’t matter what sector a client is in, it’s all about their workforce, getting to know their business, getting to know how they operate and making sure that we’re helping them achieve their to treat their people well while also being up to date with all the legal developments involved.”

Lewis Silkin itself has an intriguing history: its founder and namesake was born in 1889 into a family of Jewish Lithuanian refugees to London as the eldest of seven children and, though winning a scholarship to Oxford, was unable to take it up. He instead became an articled clerk, then MP for Peckham and 1st Baron Silkin in 1950.

He set up the firm as Silkin and Silkin with his brother Joseph. His son John renamed the firm as Lewis Silkin and Partners and it opened its employment practice in 1990, based on lawyers having a combination of contentious and non-contentious practice, which it believes to be the first firm to develop an employment specialism in this way.

According to Ms Rush, Lewis Silkin in 2024 is still not a typical law firm.

“We used to have a rather lovely strapline saying: ‘a rather more human law firm’,” she says. “And its distinctiveness includes the fact that its regional offices are not seen as satellites — rather, we’re all under one umbrella and the support from the centre has been great.”

Employment law also demands understanding on a personal level, she notes, and recalls speaking to a practitioner from Galway who said he had exchanged employment law for family law: “He explained that if someone’s marriage is breaking down, they can at least go to work and partly escape the home situation — whereas if your employment relationship is breaking down, it permeates everything.”

When it comes to recruitment, Ms Rush looks for a high emotional intelligence quotient: “When they are dealing with HR people, for example, it can be very stressful for these staff because they are taking on board the anxieties of employees. After all, nobody ever goes to HR to tell them they are really enjoying their job.”

“There are elements of the work that deal with the breakdown of trust and confidence in the employment relationship, and that can be challenging for everybody.”

So, what motivates her to go to a challenging job every day? “Having to make a packed lunch for my children,” she laughs, then reflects: “I l do love the work and its diversity. Every day, every situation is different and that’s simply because there are different personalities and clients react to things in individual ways.”

“I really enjoy working with the team that I’ve built here and I’m very lucky to be at a stage where I’ve been practising employment law now for almost 24 years, and I’m still very motivated as there’s still so much to learn.

“For example, there’s the EU Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages deadline to meet and I think we’re going to see a lot more action in protected disclosures, in collective bargaining and in so many different areas. Because no situation is ever the same, your brain keeps working.”

Her mother, who was keen for her children to succeed professionally, remains an inspiration for long-term objectives, as at 86 she still swims in the pool with her on Monday evenings. Ms Rush also regularly visits the Forty Foot or Sandy Cove beach with a friend for what she insists is a dip rather than a swim in the sea. “I do that all year round and it’s lovely — a great reset.”