Monica Atwal

Practice Areas

Monica is an employment and immigration lawyer and managing partner of Clarkslegal.

Monica has over 20 years’ experience and has represented a significant number of high- profile clients on complex employment and immigration matters and regularly provides training to her corporate clients. Clients range from individuals, start-ups, SMEs to large multinational organisations, working in a range of sectors from IT, utilities, pharmaceuticals, retail, logistics, motor and professional/service firms.

Monica represents clients on small to large scale redundancies, high-profile disability cases, pensions, discrimination, equal pay and whistleblowing issues. A talented advocate and litigator, she regularly represents clients in the UK tribunals and is known as a passionate advocate for her clients.

She specialises in assisting businesses with the global transfer of staff – particularly at director level – and their families. She also assists entrepreneurs, investors and overseas companies setting up in the UK.

Monica has published articles in national and specialist media, sat on legal know how boards and presented numerous talks and seminars.

Immigration

Monica advises UK and international companies, obtaining visas for entrepreneurs, investors and overseas companies setting up in the UK. She acts for a range of companies, assisting them with their sponsorship licence and employing overseas workers. Clients can be provided with a complete immigration outsource function as an extension of their HR team, ensuring the recruitment of talent and dealing with all aspects of the sponsor management system.

Redundancy/restructuring

Monica advises on a significant number of projects including small to large scale redundancies, transfers of businesses both in and out of organisations and changes to terms and conditions, including to pension schemes. Monica works with clients to achieve smooth change management where the emphasis is on engagement and ensuring positive outcomes for the business and the employees.

Discrimination

Monica advises on all aspects of discrimination, equal pay, whistleblowing, family friendly and flexible working requests. Examples include being involved in the first Court of Appeal case on disability discrimination and successfully acting for a manager who was awarded record damages in a depression case. Monica regularly represents clients in high profile tribunal claims and won a significant whistleblowing claim for a financial director.

Training and Advice

Monica is experienced in tribunal claims and has a high success rate. A number of claims get withdrawn prior to clients incurring substantial costs. Monica assists with preventative measures and supports the client’s brand by running employee engagement programmes and training seminars. Which varies from one-to-one director coaching to group workshops.

Employment advice ranges from simple checks to complex and strategic matters. Monica gets to know her clients’ businesses well to provide practical, robust and commercial advice that balances legal risk appropriately for their business.