He said: “Employment law is important in lots of really significant ways. If you think about discrimination law, it has been an engine for social change, so the law has constantly been ahead of where we were socially.
“When I came to the bar back in 1991 you still had people who would, when you had a redundancy exercise, sack the women on the basis they were much less likely to be bread-winners and fewer families would be going without earnings.
“Still today I’m doing a lot of equal pay law and people find it difficult to get their heads around the notation that men and women should earn the same money for the same work – but it’s more widely accepted than it was.
“Those laws went ahead of where society was.
“Employment law has a social importance, but it also has a political importance.
“It’s one of those areas, a bit like tax law, that no government leaves alone. In every manifesto there’s always some change proposed.”
Sean explained Conservative governments tend to be “intensely suspicious” of collective employment rights and see them as a “burden on business”.
He continued: “Mrs Thatcher made it harder to strike, then Boris Johnson made it harder to strike, so Conservative administrations tend not to favour collective employment rights.”
While the Conservatives had increased the period of time a worker had to have been employed before they could raise an unfair dismissal claim, the current Labour government is bringing that down and is generally more “union friendly”.
Sean went on: “There’s a sort of ebb and flow as administrations change. There are areas of employment law that everyone wants to get involved in a re-legislate.”
You’ll struggle to find many people more passionate about employment law than Sean, who made an interesting comparison to sum up his enthusiasm.
“When I’m trying to sell employment law to pupils and applicants to become lawyers, I always say it’s like Heat magazine for nerds. It’s just fantastic,” he said.
“It’s ultimately people, so the disputes tend to be fascinating. You get a window into other lives and other working environments.
“As an employment barrister you might have to know everything about working on an oil rig on Monday, and by Friday you’re dealing with sacking a football manager.
“That range of human activity is just fascinating and it endlessly cycles past you when you’re doing this job.
“Almost every day there’s something new and interesting.”
Sean was a speaker at last year’s Employment Law Conference, which he described as an “excellent” event, and set out what attendees can expect this time round.
He said: “There will be quite a bit about the Employment Rights Bill which is creeping towards coming into force and produces some really very substantial changes - for instance, to unfair dismissal.
“There’ll be quite a bit about online culture wars which are now expressing themselves in complicated, intractable and heated employment disputes – so sort of freedom of speech at work issues.
“Generally anything of note which has happened in the last 12 months, and anything that’s about to happen, we will deal with.
“Employment law is important because the thing I like about it is that there’s lots of it and it changes rapidly. But on the flipside of that is, if it is your job to make sure that the company for which you work always stays on the right side of the law, to some extent you’re constantly running after the law as it develops.
“You need to understand what has happened because it’s just too easy to get something wrong. And if you do get something wrong the consequences can be very significant.”
Turning to his own career, Sean said: “I’m probably still doing the biggest case I’ve ever done. I’m representing about 12,000 claimants in the Tesco equal pay litigation.
“The employees have been divided into three tranches and we are two-thirds of the way through dealing with the first tranch after seven years. It is immense as a case, but it’s worth potentially such an enormous compensation bill.”
Cases involving “naughty footballers” have also often proved memorable for Sean – for a variety of reasons.
He said: “I did a case for Newcastle United and ex-manager Alan Pardew came to give evidence and the bit I remember most of all is him moaning about how tight his shoes were.
“I also did a football case against Leeds United and a solicitor called me a ‘f***ing c***’ in court. That was something of a highlight. The judge nearly had a heart attack. We had an adjournment while he apologised to me.
In another memorable moment, Sean almost found himself arrested while watching court proceedings from the public gallery as a student and doodling in his notepad.
Sean had absent mindedly drawn a picture of the judge, who spotted him scribbling away and sent his usher to retrieve the notebook.
He said: “I’m crapping myself up in the public gallery and the judge takes a look at it and says ‘this is rather good… but you mustn’t draw me under any circumstances – it’s a criminal offence’.
“I said I understood and he said ‘thank you very much, I’m going to keep this’.”