Employment & Benefits

Our Employment & Benefits (E&B) group comprises some of the market’s leading practitioners across Employment, Pensions and Incentives, with over 180 lawyers located across 22 jurisdictions.  Consistently highly ranked in the legal tables in each of the three areas, we offer high quality advice on issues such as boardroom disputes, employee discrimination, executive remuneration and tax issues, pensions disputes and on E&B issues in relation to complex  transactional issues.

The E&B group works as part of an integrated team with our corporate M&A lawyers, not only in carrying out projects, but in winning them too, as most large scale M&A transactions involve HR issues which can often be critical to the outcome of a transaction.

Our Employment specialists are involved in all contentious and non-contentious matters including boardroom disputes, employee relations, HR policies and privacy, restructuring, and dispute resolution.  The team assist clients before all national courts (as well as the European Court of Justice) for matters such as employment tribunals, compromise agreements, mediation, all types of discrimination cases, whistleblowing, as well as individual and collective labour conflicts. 

Our Pensions specialists handle quality advisory and litigation work for both trustees and scheme sponsors, while our Incentives team offers expert advice on equity incentive plans, employment tax issues and corporate governance in the context of reward.

The team is renowed for being at the forefront of using innovative tools to assist clients to meet their needs and challenges on HR related matters including the development of the firm's first practice specific App - the Little Red App.  With a client centric approach, we cover not only standalone advisory and corporate transactional support but also provide clients with a more bespoke approach which includes providing training, regular legal bulletins and a broad range of value added services.  We are committed to the development of best practice within all three areas and devote a considerable amount of time and resources to training our lawyers to ensure our clients receive the best, practical and robust advice.

Notable matters our E&B group have worked on include:

• Employment: Defending New Group Newspapers against the well publicised High Court claim brought by former editor Andy Coulson for payment of his criminal legal fees under a clause in his compromise agreement.
• Pensions: Advising on the recent high profile High Courst pensions litigation for both QinetiQ and Prudential
• Incentives: Advising a financial services company listed on the Australian stock exchange on the incentives aspects of its acquisition of a fund management business.  The nature of the business meant the retention and incentivisation of the key employees over the long term was of vital importance to the client.

You can find more information about the Employment & Benefits practice area on the main Allen & Overy website.