Janet's Repentance, from George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, depicts a drunken and debauched lawyer called Dempster.Despite his Bacchic excesses, Dempster, according to one of his acquaintances, 'knows more about law when he's drunk than all the rest of 'em when they're sober'.

Eliot's portrayal of Dempster is in fact based on a real life Nuneaton lawyer, who is an ancestor of Janet Gaymer, a fact the Simmons & Simmons partner admits to with a mixture of chagrin and amusement.Without realising the link - later unearthed by her architect brother - Mrs Gaymer even applied for a holiday job with the 'Dempster' firm, still trading in the East Midlands, before going up to Oxford to read jurisprudence.

'It was fate, you see.

I'm a great believer in fate,' is her observation.Oxford unearthed some contradictions in the girl from the sticks.

Attracted by the theoretical slant of the first degree course, with its emphasis on Roman law, she ended up serving on the committee charged with making the whole thing more vocational.The dreaming spires also pointed to romance.

She met her husband-to-be, John (now a property partner with Baileys Shaw & Gillett), in a Lenny (now Lord Justice) Hoffmann land law tutorial.'I don't think [Hoffmann] was the magic ingredient for love, but he certainly was a very good tutor,' she concedes.Now 46, Mrs Gaymer has reached the peak of her career without recourse to any of the nominal trans-sexuality required of Eliot.

Being a woman, she says, has actually helped: 'There were very few women in the profession when I started out, so it was almost a calling card being female.'She is chairman of the Law Society's employment law committee, and chairman of the nearly 500-strong E mployment Lawyers Association, which she was instrumental in launching in January 1993.But her association with employment law is as good as accidental.

She was just finishing her articles with Simmons & Simmons in the early 1970s, when the first unfair dismissal case came into the firm under the Industrial Relations Act 1971.There had been no employment law content in her Oxford degree, but she recalls: 'It was a litigant in person on the other side, so I thought, well if he can learn it so can I, and I literally did the night before, and we won the case.'The work snowballed from there, and she took the opportunity of pregnancy in 1977 to reinforce her knowledge with a part-time LLM in employment law at the LSE.

'I have vivid memories of being pregnant and going to seminars and having the baby and the whole thing sort of merged together.'She now has two children aged 14 and 16 whose talk of becoming lawyers she finds 'almost depressing'.

But one advantage of raising children and being an employment law specialist was writing her own maternity conditions - a little above the statutory minimum, of course.While the 1970s saw a notable growth in legislation protecting employees and outlawing discrimination, the following decade saw a concerted effort by legislators to disestablish trade unions.Indeed, the loss of the grip of the unions has radically altered the employment lawyer's job, she says, with the emphasis falling much more on the drafting of the individual contract of employment.More work for lawyers maybe, but she notes a legal downside: 'You may almost see a return to the problems that everyone thought had gone away.

For example, if you take a trade union out of a negotiating position, so that bargaining becomes more fragmented and is done on an individual basis, then there's more scope for problems like equal pay to start raising their ugly heads because there's no central control.'Against this background, Mrs Gaymer has been aware, as a partner in a large City firm usually representing large corporate employers, of the need to have an insight into the perspective of both parties.Mrs Gaymer also notes the imbalance of justice that prevails in the field.

'There's no doubt about it, at the end of the day it's an unequal bargaining position as between employers and employee...At the moment there's no legal aid for representation at industrial tribunals...You'll have some-one who may have a perfectly good claim up against an employer with a whole phalanx of legal advisers, and while tribunals will do their best to assist the litigant in person, there is no balance there.'The substantive law under discussion at tribunals is taking on an increasingly European flavour, and Ms Gaymer acknowledges that European law will become the 'guiding star' for practitioners advising their clients.Indeed, what she describes as 'one of the great challenges' for employment lawyers at present is giving clear client advice when EU and domestic law are at manifest loggerheads.But even if clients do press ahead with a case, it is now likely that delays rather than legal uncertainties will be the biggest block on its resolution.The Employment Appeals Tribunal recently noted: 'Industrial tribunals are grossly overburdened...and the EAT is gradually becoming swamped.'Mrs Gaymer views this state of affairs as a matter of real concern especially as tribunals are expanding their jurisdiction with breach of contract claims.She floats as possible solutions more specialisation of the tribunals' work and increased use of alternative dispute resolution.Away from the pressures of the court system, she is learning the flute and, though a novice, grade one is already in her sights.A major project is her book, The Contract of Employment, due for delivery to the publishers, Sweet & Maxwell, later this year.With all that on her plate, it is just lucky she does not share the drinking habits of her ancestor Dempster!