Ravisy v Simmons & Simmons LLP & Anor

An employee who lives and works abroad will ordinarily fall outside the territorial reach of British employment legislation. Territorial jurisdiction may nevertheless arise where the connections with Great Britain and British employment law are sufficiently strong to overcome the territorial pull of the place of work. The exercise requires a comparative evaluation, not the application of fixed exceptional categories.

Under article 8(1) of the Recast Brussels 1 Regulation, closely connected claims against defendants domiciled in different Member States may be heard in the courts where one defendant is domiciled. The provision is not confined to defendants joined in a single procedural action. Its application turns on the risk of irreconcilable judgments, not domestic procedural mechanics.

A French-qualified equity partner worked almost exclusively from her firm’s Paris office. She brought Employment Tribunal claims for equal pay, direct race and sex discrimination, and victimisation against the United Kingdom-registered LLP, and discrimination claims against a French partner.

The Employment Tribunal held that it had international jurisdiction over both respondents, but dismissed the claims because their connection with France meant that they fell outside the territorial jurisdiction of British employment legislation. The claimant appealed that conclusion. The second respondent cross-appealed the finding of international jurisdiction, relying on his French domicile.

The central issues were whether article 8(1) permitted the claim against the second respondent to proceed in England, and whether the claimant’s work had a sufficiently strong connection with Great Britain and British employment law.

1. Cross-appeal dismissed. Article 8(1) of the Recast Brussels 1 Regulation applied although the claims against the two respondents had been commenced in separate actions. The provision did not require the words “in the same action” to be added to “one of a number of defendants”. Its purpose was to avoid irreconcilable judgments, and its operation could not depend on differing national rules about joinder or consolidation.

2. The claims arose from the same factual matrix and were closely connected. Separate proceedings in England and France created an accepted risk of irreconcilable judgments. The second respondent could therefore be sued in England alongside the LLP. Considerations of forum conveniens had no role under the Regulation’s fixed jurisdictional rules.

3. Appeal dismissed. The applicable territorial inquiry was whether the claimant’s employment had connections with Great Britain and British employment law sufficiently strong to overcome the territorial pull of France, where she lived and worked. The established examples of posted workers and British enclaves were illustrative only. The assessment required comparison of the competing connections.

4. The claimant was a truly expatriate worker. Her occasional, short visits to London did not make her a peripatetic or commuting expatriate worker. The Employment Tribunal was entitled to give limited weight to the LLP’s English registration, its London governance, the claimant’s regulatory registration, English-law agreements and guarantees, and the retirement process.

5. The Paris office, the claimant’s working life, remuneration, tax position, professional status and local dispute-resolution arrangements connected the employment firmly with France and French law. The Tribunal’s conclusion was not wrong under the restrained appellate approach required by the Court of Appeal. The claims remained outside the territorial jurisdiction of the Tribunal and stood dismissed.

• Employment Appeal Tribunal: Appeal and cross-appeal dismissed. The Employment Tribunal’s dismissal of the claims for lack of territorial jurisdiction was upheld.
• Employment Tribunal, London (Central): Employment Judge Auerbach held that the Tribunal had international jurisdiction over both respondents, but that the claims fell outside the territorial reach of the relevant British employment legislation. The judgment was dated 14 December 2017.