Emily Sadler

Emily is an experienced commercial contracts lawyer who has been drafting and advising on a wide range of commercial contracts since qualifying in 2007. She joined Harper James from leading South Coast firm Paris Smith, where she was promoted to partner.

She is an efficient and accurate drafter who takes a practical, commercial approach, advising clients on their legal position and options in plain English. Emily concentrates on building lasting relationships, so her clients feel at ease treating her as an approachable extension of their in-house team.

Emily brings valuable in-house insight from secondments at Randstad and, more recently, Schneider Electric. She has a particular specialism in franchising, acting for both franchisors and franchisees, and has been on the panel of recommended lawyers for Toni & Guy and a leading domiciliary care franchise.

Recruitment is another area of real expertise for Emily, having supported many recruitment-sector clients with their terms of trading, preferred supplier agreements and other contractual requirements.

Emily works with clients ranging from large international corporates to smaller owner-managed businesses. Her work spans distribution and channel partner agreements, standard terms of trading, framework agreements, SaaS agreements, franchise agreements, NDAs and recruitment-sector contracts.

Work highlights include:

• Drafting franchise agreements for two new franchisors (a Greek bakery and a hot tub business), ensuring compliance with British Franchise Association standards and competition law;

• Drafting the standard terms of business and a preferred supplier agreement for a large recruitment business, ensuring compliance with applicable sector-specific legislation;
• Advising a specialist electric vehicle charging infrastructure business on the NDAs and finder agreements underpinning its commercial growth.
• Advising a technology platform business on its platform agreement;
• Advising a professional services consultancy specialising in enterprise software implementations on embedding its implementation methodology into its master services agreement and statement-of-work framework.

Emily lives in sunny Southampton with her husband and two children and, in what little spare time she has, enjoys travelling and keeping fit with her local running group and going to the gym.

"I take a genuinely commercial view of my clients' businesses, not just their contracts. My aim is to be the approachable, reliable extension of their team that they can always pick up the phone to, giving them clear, practical advice they can act on with confidence."