Eleanor Williams was 16 when she suffered a brain haemorrhage while windsurfing in France, which left her unable to walk, speak or breathe unaided.


Twenty years on, she has forged a career as an employment solicitor with a special interest in disability issues, set alight by the challenge of litigation. Discouraged from considering the bar because her voice would not be strong enough, she says: ‘Every time I finish a piece of litigation and say “no further questions”, it is a shout of victory. Having a weird voice is not a disadvantage, particularly once you learn that the greatest tool of the advocate is silence.’



It has taken steely determination to achieve her ambition. Confined to a wheelchair after a year in hospital, she completed her A-levels and a law degree at University College, Oxford, before taking up a place at the College of Law in York.



Then came the task of securing a training contract. Ms Williams remembers one letter: ‘Dear Miss Williams, We were very impressed by your CV but our offices are upstairs…’ She says: ‘No one bothered to say “come and meet us” or think that, as I was getting more mobile, perhaps I could manage.’



But her career moved on apace after she contacted Remploy, the largest employer of disabled people, which subsidised her while she did her articles with a Welsh local authority. She later became Remploy’s lead employment lawyer.



Three years ago, she moved to Capital Law Commercial in Cardiff, managing her work with the help of a secretary funded by an access-to-work grant, who ‘acts as her hands’ during tribunal cases. ‘My firm is hugely supportive and the atmosphere in the office allows me to be frank and open. I have a magical chair that practically makes a cup of tea but I don’t have any other gizmos as I find voice recognition programs lapse into gobbledegook too quickly.’



She is very aware of her disability when she meets clients for the first time. ‘My disability is a much bigger issue for me than for the people around me, but it makes it very easy for people to underestimate me as an opposing advocate. I have turned my disability to my advantage unashamedly, but I am rigorous that I won’t become a professional disabled person. I am a professional person who happens to be disabled.’



After years of walking with a stick almost as tall as herself, she went to see a Chinese masseur in Cardiff docks and can now manage without it, although she describes herself as ‘still a bit wobbly’.


‘However, this has had the inverse effect of making me care more and more about disability, which I hadn’t expected.

‘So much so that, although I still have a general discrimination caseload, I am becoming more and more fixed on the single issue of disability. My ambition is to see the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 scrapped because it is no longer needed.’