Employment
The continual ebbing and flowing of rights and power struggles between companies and their employees, means that employment law remains the most rapidly changing area of law at present. The common perception is that employment law bends ever increasingly towards the employee whilst the employer struggles to maintain a balance of power and to keep his workforce motivated, incentivised and free from dispute.
Introducing new rights particularly to encourage flexibility of working and family life is a commitment of the government and is to keep a pace with Europe. These changes in legislation, when they appear tend not to be gradual – quite the opposite – many are radical and will have a huge impact on the way employers manage and conduct their business. The new maternity laws for instance covering changes in maternity pay and adoption will have serious and long standing implications for employers particularly where the employee will be out of the business for a long period of time and in most cases now up to 12 months.
In addition with many people living to a greater age, we have new laws on age discrimination (introduced last year) and this could potentially mean that employers have less flexibility to choose and shape their own businesses. Employment legislation is now a prescriptive and complex area of the law that needs to be handled cautiously with a constant eye on changing procedures. We aim to assist you with the challenges this will present for your business.
We act for both employers and employees. Acting for both gives us a clear perspective of the issues so that we can deliver commercial solutions.
We encourage our clients to talk to us as early as possible before problems escalate and discuss with us their business and surrounding issues so that we can deliver the best practical solution.
If matters do become litigious, our employment team are experienced litigators and negotiators and know when to proceed to litigation and when to consider settlement.
All of our lawyers adopt a commercial “hands on” approach looking at the effect on the business and not just implementing the law.
Employment with all Services
We provide our clients with a range of services that include:
- Advice on restructuring and reshaping the business to suit changing business needs, downsizing and outsourcing.
- Advice on preliminary employment issues even before disciplinary and grievance steps have been taken.
- Advice on implementing the new statutory procedures which had been mandatory in the UK since the end of 2004.
- Advice on the drafting of contracts and policies to assist the future smooth running of the business in relation to employee issues.
- Advice on issues relating to discrimination, sex race disability and age.
- Advice on termination of employment and providing estimates for termination agreements.
- Advice on restrictive covenants, golden handshake and gold handcuff clauses.
- Advice of TUPE 2006 which has changed the shape of TUPE and the legislation which has been in place since 1981.
- Employment tribunal and county and high court litigation – we have extensive experience and are successful and experienced negotiators so that litigation may not be necessary.
Partner
Lynne Burns