For most employees, dismissal becomes a claim afterwards. For some — typically senior, contractual, high-stakes — there’s a remedy most people never hear about until it’s too late to use: the employment injunction, restraining the dismissal before it completes.
When Courts Intervene
The classic case: a dismissal being executed in breach of the contract or fair procedures — the disciplinary process your contract promises, skipped; the outcome visibly predetermined; the summary dismissal without conduct to justify it. Courts can restrain the termination or its implementation pending trial, order that contractual procedures be followed, and — often the commercial heart — continue salary and benefits while the case runs, so you aren’t starved into surrender.
The Honest Bar
Because these orders compel a relationship to continue, they’re mandatory in substance — and the threshold is correspondingly high: a strong case likely to succeed, not merely an arguable one, per the standard the courts apply to mandatory interlocutory relief. Courts are also frank about their reluctance to force unwilling parties together indefinitely: the remedy protects process and position, and what usually emerges from a strong application is a negotiated exit on proper terms — the injunction’s deepest function being bargaining equality restored at the moment it matters. The full analysis lives on the Employment Injunctions page.
The clock is the whole game: this remedy restrains what hasn’t completed. Notice given but not yet effective, a suspension sliding toward a predetermined outcome, “Friday is your last day” — those are today-phone-call situations. Bring the contract, the correspondence and the chronology; the first honest assessment — including whether the injunction route’s costs fit your case, or whether the statutory route serves better — can usually be given quickly.
A dismissal in motion? 01 5827148 — today beats Friday.