Roland Berger v Perrin: why a Stockport home address can anchor a £45m Middle East dispute in London

When 24 employees leave a management consultancy at almost exactly the same time to join a major competitor, the legal fallout is unlikely to be tidy. What Roland Berger Limited v Darren Perrin [2026] EWHC 1506 (Comm) illustrates is just how much turns, in the first instance, not on who did what or where, but on something as mundane as where one of them happens to own a house.

Dr Darren Perrin spent roughly 60% of his working time in the Middle East during his employment with Roland Berger Limited. His clients were almost entirely in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. His new employer is based in Abu Dhabi. The alleged wrongdoing, on Roland Berger's case, was planned and executed largely in Dubai. Yet Richard Salter KC, sitting as a Deputy Judge in the Commercial Court, dismissed Dr Perrin's application to have the proceedings stayed in favour of the State Court of Dubai, and the three reasons for that decision are worth examining carefully.

The first is simply that Dr Perrin is British and owns a home in Stockport. That matters not just as a matter of sentiment but as a matter of statute. The Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments Act 1982 provides that an employer may only sue a UK-domiciled employee in the part of the United Kingdom where that employee is domiciled. Parliament made that choice deliberately, and the courts have consistently treated it as conferring a genuine protective entitlement, not merely a default that can be overridden whenever the facts have an international flavour.

The second reason is the employment contract itself. The Director Agreement was governed by English law and contained an exclusive jurisdiction clause in favour of the English courts. The judge applied the well-established principle that such clauses are almost invariably upheld and that a party seeking to escape one must show overwhelming reasons for doing so. Dr Perrin's case was that the broader dispute about a mass team move was so firmly rooted in the Middle East that the exclusive jurisdiction clause should yield. The court was not persuaded.

The third, and perhaps most instructive, reason concerns the limits of speculative litigation strategy. Dr Perrin's team argued that the real dispute was the team move as a whole, and that Dubai was the natural home for any proceedings that would eventually name the other 23 departing employees and the Kearney entities. The court accepted that this was a genuine possibility, but declined to treat possibility as probability. Roland Berger had not confirmed it would sue in Dubai. There was no certainty that the Dubai courts would even accept jurisdiction over all of the relevant claims if it did. Granting a provisional stay to see what happened next was not, in the judge's view, an appropriate response to that level of uncertainty.

That reasoning has a wider resonance. It is a reminder that the Spiliada test requires a defendant to identify an actually available alternative forum, not a potentially available one, and to show that it is clearly or distinctly more appropriate, not merely that it has closer geographical connections to some of the underlying facts. The doctrine of forum non conveniens demands something more concrete than the prediction of hypothetical proceedings in a jurisdiction that may or may not have competence over the claim.

What remains unresolved, of course, is whether Roland Berger will bring further claims. The group's lawyers sent letters of claim to former employees and to the Kearney entities threatening civil and criminal proceedings under UAE law. Those letters made no specific allegations against Dr Perrin. The £45m claimed against him alone stretches credibility as a recovery target, and the court noted the obvious inference that Kearney's indemnity, if one exists, may be the real prize. That question will come into sharper focus as the litigation develops. For now, Dr Perrin remains in an English court, bound by an English contract, and answerable in Stockport.