International Employment Law

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We provide confidence that your Human Resources systems operate lawfully and effectively around the world.

With the ever-increasing internationalization of business, the need for companies to effectively manage their international workforce continues to grow. Employers with multinational businesses face a myriad of foreign employment laws and local cultural considerations that impact how they can best achieve their commercial objectives.

Given the premium placed on good corporate citizenship and the legal, commercial, and financial risks arising from international compliance issues, companies need to be able to monitor and maintain control over their offshore operations and have comfort and confidence that their employment systems and approach operate lawfully and effectively around the world.

HOW WE HELP

Seyfarth's International Employment Law practice is the world’s largest specialist practice of its kind, with experience covering more than 180 countries, acting for some of the world’s largest multinational companies on a global, regional, and local basis. We assist multinational employers with a full range of employment-related matters at the global, regional, and local levels—issues ranging from day-to-day international matters on a single-country basis, to large and complex multijurisdictional employment law projects and transactions.  Our service model involves only foreign-trained lawyers with true specialist international employment expertise, ensuring the highest quality of service.  

OUR SERVICES

International Transactional Assistance. Mergers and acquisitions, spinoffs and joint ventures, including HR due diligence, international employment structures, advice regarding union and/or works council consultation, business transfer laws and post-transaction workforce integration issues.

Compliance Issues. Labor and employment law requirements such as working hours/overtime, leave requirements, data protection, and anti-discrimination and harassment issues; as well as corporate compliance measures such as codes of conduct, whistleblowing, and anti-bribery programs.

Strategic and Commercial HR Initiatives. Remote working arrangements, performance management programs, international assignment/transfer structures, and retention and remuneration arrangements including compensation, commission and bonus arrangements, non-compete/nonsolicitation arrangements, and IP protection arrangements.

Contracts, Policies and Procedures. Employee handbooks, offer letters and employment contracts, and work rules/company regulations.

Reductions-in-Force. Individual and large scale multicountry initiatives.

Outsourcing Arrangements. Small and large scale non-employment structures on a single and multijurisdictional basis.

Non-Employee Issues. Vendor, temporary, and contractor arrangements.

Employment Counseling Issues. Day-to-day and one-off issues related to non-US and cross-border workforce issues.

OUR SCOPE

Our employment law teams located in our US, UK, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Australia offices enable us to provide real time assistance on the ground. Team members in these offices provide clients with premier expertise at the local levels, as well as regional expertise across the Asia Pacific; Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and Latin America.

Notably, at the regional and global levels, we specialize in multijurisdictional employment law projects and transactions, including:

Cross-Border Employment Projects. In the last year we completed more than 200 multijurisdictional strategic and compliance projects covering more than 120 countries.

International Transactions. We acted as specialist international employment counsel on more than 20 international transactions in the last year, including in some of the highest-profile global M&A transactions. A testimony to the profile of the practice is that we were appointed by the client to provide specialist international employment advice in each of these transactions where other firms were the client's appointed deal counsel.

We act for large multinational clients across a variety of industries (the team has particularly deep experience serving technology industry clients). In addition to  serving large multinational companies, the team acts for acquisitive  international organizationsoften with a change agenda. In either instance, the client is one who has multijurisdictional, strategically important and commercially sensitive employment needs.

THE SEYFARTH EXPERIENCE

Our team has changed the way that many of the world’s largest companies manage their global employment issues by providing an experienced central point of contact for all international employment matters. We operate a team-based approach with continuity among the lawyers working on clients’ matters to ensure that institutional knowledge about our clients and their industries is captured and properly leveraged over time. Unlike other firms, our international employment law practice is not composed of domestic lawyers who try to do international work as a sideline to their domestic practice.

Our team is very experienced in developing custom solutions to address the types of legal issues faced by companies doing business internationally. Having worked across more than 180 countries, our team is known for its innovative solutions and high-quality commercial results for our clients.

We have a series of long-standing and very well-tested and reliable relationships with top employment lawyers across the globe. These relationships allow us to deliver a work product that takes account of our clients’ commercial objectives in a short timeframe and with budget certainty. We can guarantee that the right people are always working on our clients’ matters, irrespective of jurisdiction. Few other firms, if any, can deliver on this promise. We have done so for many years. Further, we can work with our clients’ preferred firms in any jurisdiction(s) they desire because we do not have competition or conflict issues with any local firms, given our specific practice model and structure.

Where global or regional international employment law matters include the United States, our International Employment Law practice works in seamless coordination with the firm’s market-leading US Labor & Employment team.