Partner, Manchester
Laura Hadzik has specialised in road transport law for almost two decades. The catalyst for our chat, however, is another role she’ll be undertaking alongside her day job – chair of Women in Bus and Coach.
Laura says that women account for over half of bus users but only 10% of the workforce in the bus industry. Women in Bus and Coach was set up to encourage, represent, support and retain women in the bus, coach and community transport professions.
Laura attended Women in Bus and Coach’s national launch event in 2023 and was asked to join the northern region steering group. She joined the board as a director last year. Women in Bus and Coach founder Louise Cheeseman OBE then indicated her intention to step down as chair at the end of her three-year tenure. Laura was offered the position at the beginning of this year and will take up the post in June.
Increasing the 10% female workforce statistic will be one of her main goals. There is little data available other than that headline figure, she says. ‘A top priority is to get far greater engagement from the sector at the regional level and grassroots networks – from all three elements of the transport sector [bus, coach and community transport] to feed into our national strategy.’
Laura wants Women in Bus and Coach to become a ‘credible voice’ that the sector turns to for diversity and inclusion issues.
The organisation will continue to engage with key decision-makers, such as ministers and combined authorities. Laura says Women in Bus and Coach is doing lots of work in regions exploring or progressing a bus franchising scheme or enhanced partnerships with private operators. ‘We’re trying to engage with them so when they introduce enhanced partnerships or franchising, diversity and inclusion are part of their tendering processes,’ she says.
Laura ‘fell into’ road transport law, a specialism she wasn’t even aware of when she went to law school. She applied for a training contract at Aaron & Partners. The chair of the interview panel (‘who would go on to become a mentor and champion of my career’) offered Laura a six-month stint as a paralegal in the firm’s road transport team before she commenced her training contract.
'Because of the nature of the work, you’re dealing with clients in highly pressured scenarios where they are facing potential loss of businesses'
‘The work was so varied. One day, you could be dealing with a haulage company. The next, you could be dealing with a coach or bus company. They’re totally different businesses, albeit they’re all road transport. The people working in these sectors are fantastic.’
When Laura began her training contract, she did a seat in employment, ‘then begged to be allowed to go back to road transport because I loved it so much’.
After nearly five years at Aaron & Partners, Laura joined JMW, where she established a road transport offering. She then spent nearly a decade at Backhouse Jones, a leading name in road transport law.
Laura returned to JMW Solicitors in 2023 as a partner and head of the commercial road transport department. Her work includes traffic commissioner hearings, tribunal appeals, advice and representation in connection with organisations such as the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, police and UK Border Force, operator licensing, and advising passenger vehicle operators on bus reliability and punctuality.
‘Because of the nature of the work, you’re dealing with [clients] in highly pressured scenarios where they are facing potential loss of businesses. You quickly become a trusted adviser,’ says Laura. She often gets calls from clients with non-legal queries such as what fuel to use for lorries or coaches.
Her clients, she says, ‘care about the service they’re delivering and the fact they are providing a service to passengers. When they have an issue that requires my involvement, they want to understand what’s gone wrong, what needs to be done to change it and put it right. They never want to find themselves in that situation again. I talk about what they need to do differently, how they can do that and how they can build that into their cultures long-term’.
There can’t be many road transport lawyers, I note. Laura reckons she can count on one hand the number of firms that specialise in this field. JMW has a team of seven sector specialist lawyers, Laura says proudly, potentially one of the biggest road transport teams in the country. She is also proud to be a partner in a leading law firm with a commercial road transport team focused on a sector heavily dominated by men.
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