Luis oversees ABLA's Sydney Workplace Relations practice and has over 15 years' experience practicing as a specialist employment and industrial relations lawyer acting for a broad range of employers across both the private and public sector.
His advocacy experience in State and Federal Courts and Tribunals is extensive. In addition to achieving successful outcomes for clients as an advocate in numerous unfair dismissal and industrial dispute arbitrations, he acted as one of the lead employer advocates in the 2014/2015 Fair Work Commission Annual Leave Test Case as well as the highly publicised 2016/2017 Penalty Rates Test Case. Following heavily contested hearings in both proceedings, Luis ultimately succeeded in securing a raft of amendments to modern awards in respect of both annual leave and weekend penalty rates.
Luis is the trusted advisor to a number of organisations when it comes to large scale industrial bargaining. In the public sector, he has been the principal advisor on department-wide enterprise agreement negotiations, covering tens of thousands of public sector employees. In the private sector, he has advised on enterprise bargaining for the transport, education, aviation, manufacturing, pharmaceutical and food and beverage industries. This experience has also extended to obtaining orders preventing unlawful industrial action and successfully resisting good faith bargaining claims and scope order applications filed by union parties.
He has conducted numerous investigations for clients in relation to internal employment disputes and bullying and harassment matters and continues to be a lead litigator in the developing General Protections and bullying jurisdictions.
In addition to working in private practice, Luis has been seconded to the Australian Federal Police and the Fair Work Ombudsman, working on a variety of employment related litigation and prosecutions and is a member of the Law Society of NSW’s Employment Law Committee.