Employment Law for Employers

Contracts support you to direct the relationships between you and your staff and outline the legal obligations for both parties.

There are different types of employment relationships your business may wish to engage with, including employee, self-employed, contractor, and workers. Our lawyers can advise you on what might be best suited to the needs of your business.

To provide your business with clarity and structure, you’ll need clear HR policies. Such policies and procedures should help your employees to understand how the company works and what’s expected of them.

Our employment lawyers at Ashtons Legal can support organisations to draft employment contracts to reflect their needs, along with transparent HR policies such as:

• Health and safety policies
• Leave and time off policies
• Sickness and absence policies
• Equality and diversity policies
• Disciplinaries and grievances
• Performance review processes
• Capability procedures.

Where employees commit misconduct or gross misconduct, it may be necessary to invoke disciplinary proceedings against them.

There are a wide variety of outcomes that may follow. Our employment law solicitors can assist you with following the correct process and advising on what outcome may result.

If an employee displays an ongoing inability to perform their role, a capability procedure is used to handle the situation.

The pre-established procedure should outline how the employer will manage the staff member’s inability to carry out the role. The goal is to establish why the employee’s performance is lacking, provide support or work towards a legally compliant dismissal if necessary.

The laws surrounding employee redundancy can be complicated.

It’s vital that business leaders follow employment law and ensure that employee rights are upheld during the process. Ashtons Legal can offer full support with redundancy processes.

We can also offer support if you are restructuring your company and need to make changes to certain employees’ roles or even to entire departments.

If you’ve recently acquired a new business, you’ll need to be aware of any TUPE regulations that may be in place. The presence of TUPE legislation means that you may be obligated to keep on the employees who have been working for the previous owner.

Our employment law solicitors can support businesses with all manner of matters related to redundancy, restructuring and TUPE.

There are many key areas of employment law that affect recruitment processes.

These include data protection, DBS checks, discrimination and permission to work in the UK.

Our specialist solicitors at Ashtons Legal have supported businesses in a range of different industries to plan and review their recruitment policies. With our help, you can ensure compliance as well as find and retain the best talent.

Employers possess the legal right to monitor the data of their staff members in the workplace.

They have the option to monitor emails, calls, internet history or phone usage.

Monitoring employee data must be conducted in the right way, as the process comes with privacy risks and data protection rules. Our employment lawyers can advise employers on their rights and duties according to the Data Protection Act.

Under some circumstances, it may be necessary to withdraw a job offer because the candidate has not met the conditions of that offer.

Various conditions might be associated with a job offer, including references, a DBS check or the right to work in the UK.

We can support businesses throughout the process of withdrawing a job offer, ensuring that they are following the correct procedures in line with employment law.

Succession planning is about defining the crucial positions and people within your business and then creating action plans so that other staff members can assume those roles if key individuals move on. If you’re keen to future-proof your company and you’re not sure how to facilitate succession planning, we can offer expert legal assistance.

If you are looking to protect specific types of information or to introduce restrictive covenants, our lawyers can provide you with commercial and technical advice and assist with preparing the requisite documents. Should there be issues arising, such as breaches of confidence, our lawyers can assist you with the next steps to take.

In some cases, there may not be a disciplinary or capability reason causing an issue with a member of staff, but the business may feel that they have reached the end of the road with them. In such cases, a mutually agreeable parting of ways can be helpful. Our specialist solicitors can assist you in navigating these complex scenarios and preparing the necessary documentation to be legally compliant.

When employee disputes arise, you’ll need to have processes in place to resolve them and move forward.

We will do our best to support you using mediation processes. However, if we cannot resolve your dispute this way, we can offer guidance throughout employment tribunal claims or representation in county court claims.

Disputes may arise for a number of reasons, including discrimination, constructive dismissal, unfair dismissal, wrongful dismissal or pay disputes. It’s vital that such disputes are handled in the right way, or else you risk damaging your reputation.