Helen Watson was voted the first female senior partner of Aaron & Partners in early 2026, 19 years after joining as its first female equity partner. She has led the firm’s employment team for more than 16 years and is recommended by The Legal 500 in the North West and West Midlands. The independent firm has offices in Chester, Shrewsbury, Altrincham and the Wirral. She tells Business Matters why it intends to stay that way.
As senior partner, I work closely with our wider leadership team to shape and deliver the strategy for Aaron & Partners, looking at how we continue to grow the firm and develop new opportunities across the North West, North Wales and the Midlands, as well as increasingly through our international relationships.
Alongside that, I head up our employment and immigration team, where I advise regional, national and international employers on a wide range of complex employment matters: discrimination and harassment, large-scale redundancies, TUPE, trade union negotiations and workplace investigations. I am also a mediator and I appear as an advocate in the employment tribunal, where the backlog of single claims reached a record 70,000 at the end of June.
It means my role is quite varied. One day I might be helping a client navigate a particularly difficult employment issue, and the next I will be looking more broadly at where we want to take the firm and the opportunities we should be pursuing.
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