Case study: Eleanor Williams

When I started out as a lawyer, I was to the legal profession what Maria Von Trapp was to Holy Orders. I was a very half-hearted law student at University College Oxford – I could not see what the law had to do with me. It wasn’t that I didn’t find the intellectual rigour intriguing. It was more a desperation that I found nothing in law that I thought would interest me for the rest of my working life.

I qualified in 1996. At that time I moved sideways from law into training. As I was employed by Remploy Ltd., the largest provider of supported employment to disabled people in the UK, it was natural that I delivered disability training. I was part of a team operating throughout the EU, so I spent time abroad looking at disability policy.

For some reason I never let my legal background slip altogether. I managed to secure a generous scholarship from the Henry Malcolm Hubbard fund that is administered by the Law Society. This enabled me to spend a year studying disability law in France.

By the time I returned to the UK in 1998, the Disability Discrimination Act had been active for two years. Suddenly, the lights went on. At last I was passionately interested in an aspect of the law. The first part of the DDA to be enforced was Part II - the portion which deals with employment. I became an employment lawyer. And, in spite of myself, I found that I relished the arena of the employment tribunal. At this time I rekindled my interest in the Law Society, becoming the chair of the Group for Solicitors with Disabilities.

In 2000, I became the employment lawyer for Remploy Ltd. I spent the next three years on trains going around the UK defending the actions of the company.

At the end of that time Remploy and I agreed that I could come home. Home is South Wales. So I started work in the offices of Capital Law LLP in Cardiff. I still do all Remploy’s cases but enjoy a varied caseload. I represent claimants as well as respondents. I lecture at Cardiff University and in the Ecole De Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Lille.

I am a trustee of the Royal Association of Disability in Rehabilitation. I am an associate of Churchill, Minty & Friend Disability Consultants and am an associate of Employer Forum on Disability. I am the equal opportunities officer for the Confederation of South Wales Law Societies. The type of law I do is no longer restricted to employment law. It now encompasses all sorts of law where the common strand is disability. This can cover education, civil claims and public law.

I cannot take credit for having arrived here 10 years after qualifying. I was incredibly disenchanted as a law student and as a young lawyer. The only qualities that have been in evidence throughout are a rather dogged persistence combined with a woeful degree of arrogance. It is this combination that has meant that although my journey up until now has been at times precarious and circuitous, it has never been less than interesting.

My advice to anyone starting out in the law is to be ruthless about finding work that interests you. It is a great joy to me that I can say, completely and honestly, that I am passionate about the work I do. Perhaps, once Maria Von Trapp had climbed over the Alps to escape an evading army, she could say the same thing.

I am disabled as a result of a cerebral haemorrhage.

Eleanor Williams – Lecturer / Solicitor, Capital Law