My friend Tish Clyde, who has died aged 58 of cancer, was a trailblazer. A leading employment lawyer, she began her career in the 1980s, just as this area of law was becoming established. She was among the first wave of specialists to opt for a role in-house at global corporations, including GE Healthcare, DHL and Nokia. She was a role model for the next generation of female lawyers, not least for achieving so much with grace and humour.

Tish was also ahead of her time in recognising the importance of empathy and team-working long before those skills became part of good management practice. She was holistic in her approach, wanting to ensure that workplaces were progressive and inclusive, and was rightly proud to have spearheaded the improvement of working conditions at a global business that included challenging the use of forced labour. It is one of her lasting legacies.

She was petite, describing herself with typical self-deprecating humour as “vertically challenged”, and combined a steely dedication with infectious enthusiasm. It was impossible to feel negative in her company. Chic, compassionate and ruthlessly fair, she possessed the political acumen, vision and resilience to thrive in a corporate world.

Despite her considerable achievements, Tish was without ego, rare in a profession in which self-promotion can be key to advancement. During the last two years of her life, and knowing she had a terminal diagnosis, that remarkable quality of selflessness was particularly evident. She was without self-pity and strikingly more interested in talking to her friends about their own lives than discussing her illness.

Born in London, to Anne (nee Evans) and Geoffrey Powell, a chartered surveyor, Tish was educated privately at St Audries school in Somerset, and Godolphin and Latymer, in Hammersmith. She read history at Oxford, where she made many of her most enduring friendships. Tish met her future husband Andrew Clyde through mutual friends in 1990; they married in 1993.

Throughout her life, physical exercise was core to her wellbeing. She was a dancer and a passionate swimmer. Tish was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014, but was given the all-clear after six months of treatment. She continued to practise yoga with characteristic grit when she was diagnosed a second time, with bone cancer, in 2019. She memorably told me that sometimes yoga gave her more relief than morphine.

She had a great attachment to Ireland (her mother was from an Anglo-Irish family) and still visited during her illness, walking through the fields to the sea for a swim, whatever the weather.

Tish is survived by Andrew, their sons Toby and Ollie, her brother John and her sisters Annabel and Judy.