Meet Sheryn Omeri, the Australian lawyer who took on Uber and won

Sheryn Omeri was six years out of law school when Australian legal legend Geoffrey Robertson casually suggested he might have some work for her in his London chambers. He didn’t promise anything, but the mere possibility of working in the proximity of one of the world’s most renowned human rights lawyers was enough to see her pack her bags and leave home in Sydney to strike out in England.

“If he tells you to do something and you are a young law graduate full of idealism, you don’t ask questions of Geoffrey, you just do it,” she says.

Sheryn Omeri says her successful case on behalf of Uber drivers in the UK captured what made her want to be a lawyer in the first place. Credit: Steven Siewert

Omeri was no stranger to travel, having been born in Australia to a Kurdish father and Iranian mother, with relatives spread across 15 countries. She had also studied at the prestigious French university Sciences Po in Paris.

The case Robertson had in mind for the young lawyer did not work out. But a suggestion from Robertson that she spend time in the legal library of his chambers, would ultimately open the door to a legal career that would see her fight a globally significant case.

“I was thinking, oh my gosh, I’ve come all this way and now I can’t work with Geoffrey. But as he was walking in front of me down the stairs at Doughty Street Chambers he said ‘don’t leave, things come up here all the time’. And he was right. Lots of things came up.”

Omeri and I are having lunch at Bodhi Restaurant behind the Cook and Phillip Park Pool on College Street in Sydney’s CBD. We had met two years earlier in London when she was preparing for a case against the ride-sharing app, Uber. The case became the defining moment of her career because it captured everything she cared about – human rights and giving a voice to vulnerable immigrant workers.

The last time we had lunch we were at another vegan cafe called Redemption, in Notting Hill, where we chatted about the upcoming hearing in Britain’s Supreme Court, equivalent to the Australian High Court. Omeri and her colleague Jason Galbraith-Marten, QC, successfully argued that former Uber drivers James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam were ‘workers’ entitled to rights including the minimum wage, holiday pay and whistleblower protection. The court delivered its judgement in February this year and found in favour of the Uber drivers in a landmark decision.

Omeri believes the decision has implications for the gig economy in Australia because of the level of control Uber exercises over its workers. The company determines the price of rides, the terms of contracts and it can sack workers based on their performance on the app.

“Watch this space for Australian Uber litigation,” Omeri says.

The British ruling determined the Uber drivers were ultimately ‘workers’, who are entitled to some – but not all – of the employment rights that are afforded to employees. In Australia, workers are defined as either employees or independent contractors. A high level of control over a worker’s hours, pay and contractual obligations usually suggest they are employees and not contractors.

Today at Bodhi we chat about how she became involved with the Uber case as we order a selection of yum cha dishes, including the dumplings with shiitake mushroom and truffle oil, ginger wontons, tofu rice paper rolls, pumpkin dumplings and BBQ bread buns.

Yum Cha at Bodhi Restaurant in Sydney.Credit: Steve Siewert

Omeri first discovered Bodhi as an arts/law student at Sydney University. After graduating, she bypassed the big commercial law firms where most of her classmates lined up to work. Instead, she cut her teeth at the Aboriginal Legal Service in Sydney. And it was while working there that she came to Robertson’s attention.

She looked up his email address and urged him to highlight the over-representation of Aboriginal people in prisons after she spotted an advertisement for his upcoming Hypotheticals program. The subject was what, if anything, had changed for Aboriginal people one year after Kevin Rudd’s apology in 2008. A few days later Robertson replied, saying he had been part of a group at Sydney University that had agitated for the establishment of the Aboriginal Legal Service in 1970, which suggested to Omeri that he had a genuine interest in the issues she had raised.

More than a month, and a few more emails later, Omeri met Robertson in person at his book launch in Sydney. She bought a copy of The Statute of Liberty and joined a long queue for his signature.

“When I reached the head of the line I said: ‘Hello Mr Robertson, I’m Sheryn of the emails’, and he remembered our correspondence. He has this frighteningly good memory, Geoffrey. He asked me if I was still intending to come to London and suggested he had some work for me to do at his chambers.”

Two days after arriving in London, still jet-lagged, Omeri went to see Robertson who then realised it would be politically unsafe for her to work on the international case he’d had in mind.

So Omeri took up his second suggestion and planted herself at the Doughty Street Chambers library where she picked up work doing legal research and drafting pleadings and advice for other barristers. The Doughty Street Chambers are home to high-profile human rights lawyers Amal Clooney, the wife of actor George Clooney, and Australian Jennifer Robinson, who has been handling the Julian Assange case. Omeri also trained and qualified to become a barrister in London and joined Cloisters Chambers in 2010.

In the English summer of 2017, when senior barristers took their holidays leaving junior barristers to scoop up some big cases, she received an email from a colleague asking if she wanted to join his team representing Aslam and Farrar. The drivers had won a case in the employment tribunal the year before and Uber was now appealing that decision.

“I almost dropped my phone as I was reading this email and making it bigger to make sure I’d read it properly,” she says. “For a second my heart skipped a beat and I thought, ‘this is exactly what I wanted.’ And that’s where it began. Uber is one of the most rewarding pieces of work I’ve been involved in my entire career.”

“For a second my heart skipped a beat and I thought, ‘this is exactly what I wanted.’ And that’s where it began.”

Sheryn Omeri

A month after the Supreme Court’s decision in February this year, Omeri says Uber accepted it would apply to up to 90,000 drivers in Britain.

While the Supreme Court found the drivers were ‘workers’, a case about how much backpay and holiday pay they are now owed is yet to be heard. It is scheduled for June next year and is expected to cost Uber millions of pounds.

Omeri expects she will take part in that hearing remotely from Australia since the COVID-19 pandemic has allowed her to fulfil her “professional dream” of working in both Australia and England.

After visiting family in Sydney just before the first COVID-19 lockdown in March last year, she travelled to London in July for the final Uber hearings. She returned to Sydney again in late November last year to be close to family during the pandemic. She has kept working on her British cases in Australia, doing more work than any previous year, while also establishing herself as a barrister in Sydney.

“I didn’t want to be stuck very far away from my family. I went back to the UK because I was desperate to be there for the Uber case,” she says. “This was going to be the very last and most important stage of the litigation. So I was really keen to be there.”

Since qualifying for the Australian bar, Omeri has represented Reem Yelda who received $200,000 in damages in April after she won an anti-discrimination case against Sydney Water.

Dumplings at Bodhi Restaurant in Sydney.Credit: Steven Siewert

After returning to Sydney, Omeri started trying out a number of vegan restaurants “one by one” and so far ranks Bodhi and Eden in Bondi among her favourites.

As a child, she had instinctively felt that it was wrong to eat animals. But she had what she describes as an “epiphany” at the age of 16 at a relative’s wedding reception when she cut into the chicken. It looked unusually pink.

“All of a sudden I was seeing meat as something that used to be living in a very real way. And it hit me that I didn’t have to eat meat anymore,” she says.

Sheryn Omeri at one of her favourite vegan restaurants in Sydney. Credit: Steven Siewert

The only child of a Kurdish father and Iranian mother, she developed a passion for learning French at primary school and needed little encouragement to do her homework. “I always had a sense that education was important. I was genuinely fascinated to learn things,” she says.

After finishing high school in Turkey, her father won a scholarship to study at the University of California, Berkeley, before doing an MBA at the University of Oregon. He then came to Australia where he met Omeri’s mother, who has a PhD in nursing. She studied midwifery in the UK and completed a Masters degree in nursing at the University of Washington in Seattle and was awarded an Order of Australia in 2012 for her services to nursing.

But as a young girl with black curly hair, Omeri felt stifled and frustrated with the predominantly “white Anglo Saxon Christian culture” at her prestigious Sydney private school that she prefers not to name. It made her feel insecure and like an “outsider”, but in hindsight, it also helps explain why she worked so hard to succeed.

What it cost.

“I have a very personal understanding of ‘otherness’,” she says. “I often felt that I had to study hard at school because as someone who was constantly told that she did not belong in the country of her birth, I have been told a number of times that I am ‘not really Australian’, I felt that no one was ever going to do me any favours.

“But my good marks at school and university would not be denied or taken away from me. So I focused on achieving them.”

She studied and worked in France to escape the frustration she felt in Australia and found it liberating. “Studying in France was a real breath of fresh air”. It wasn’t until later in life that she realised her feelings were common among first-generation Australian children of immigrant parents. “I often felt alone in it, and as though there must be something wrong with me,” she says.

She also later realised that the answer was not to leave Australia forever. “I have to at least try to ensure that future generations do not feel the exclusion I felt,” she says.

After graduating with her law degree, Omeri worked as an associate for NSW Governor Margaret Beazley when she was a judge. Beazley had been supportive of Omeri’s decision to work at the Aboriginal Legal Service at a time when “Sydney Uni was just a conveyor belt to the corporate firms”.

“I thought this is not why I wanted to be a lawyer – to draft and proofread contracts for banks and tobacco companies,” she says. “My experiences at the Aboriginal Legal Service are what really taught me to be a lawyer and what it meant to be a lawyer. It means speaking up for people when they can’t speak up for themselves.”

Bodhi Restaurant, 2/4 College St, Sydney, 9360 2523. Check opening hours when the lockdown lifts.

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