Hi,

Well i was notified that my position was at risk of redundancy on 21 April by way of a letter that was given to me.

By way of background I am a legal secretary in a mid size law firm. Apparently the downturn in the economic crisis has caused them to further review all departments and make further redundancies. 17 were made in November 2008 but my department avoided any.

Now they are proposing to merge my role (which is a insolvency secretary) with that of a banking secretary as they believe the two are capable of being merged. I have been up until now fairly busy but its gone a little bit quiet but i have enough to keep me busy everyday all day whereas before i was overloaded and needed help from the banking secretary with dictations so i could carry out admin and my extra role in credit control. The banking secretary is always looking for extra work to do and alot of the time i see she is just on the internet.

I was given a couple of days and over a weekend to make my representations which was over 5 pages long. One of the representations was that the pool for redundancy should have included the other secretaries which are on my floor and another one was that i add extra value as i do credit control work and have clawed back about £10k for the firm since November 2008 in unpaid fees.

I received their response on Wednesday this week which stated that redundancy was not considered for the other 3 secretaries on my floor as their teams had been previously considered in the first round of redundancies. The further went on to say that my role of credit control work was being transferred to the credit controller (who i dont think has had any previous experience other than just chasing clients he then refers it to my team) apparently this decision was made before the redundancy process had been started but before yesterday nobody had actually informed me this would be happening and nobody had instructed me to start handing my files over to this person, which seems odd.

Basically i think what i want to know is whether:-

1) is a pool of 2 secretaries a fair selection for the redundancy pool?

2) can they really give somebody that has hardly any work another person's job who is busy.

3) when they gave me the notice of redundancy they also gave me the scorecard already completed. I was told by ACAS that they shouldnt have given me this scorecard so early, is this correct? Would that be a ground for unfair process?

I also stated in my representations that she would need to learn how to do everything and their response was that there would be a learning curve for which ever secretary took on the others role. I believe that her learning curve would be far greater.

My next meeting in response to their letter is tomorrow at 12 so any advice that anyone has would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you