Employment Status: Members and partners are left whistling

The Court of Appeal has held that LLP members lose employment rights but an independent contractor surgeon is ‘a worker’, reports David Ludlow A worker is ‘to some extent at least subordinate to the employer’ whereas ‘the partnership concept is the antithesis of subordination’. Employment lawyers and tribunals regularly deal with cases in which the …
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Employee Competition: Getting restrictions right

Catherine Taylor and Dominic Holmes look at some important lessons to be learned from a recent decision on team moves CEF based its case of unlawful advantage on a claim for conspiracy to injure. The High Court determined that there was no evidence to support conspiracy to injure, which is a very serious tort that …
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Anti-Corruption: Conducting cross-border investigations

Companies investigating fraud in both the UK and US need to be aware of key differences in local legislation, explain Ellen Temperton, James Storke and Jim Hart This article focuses on three areas critical to an investigation spanning the UK and US – whistleblower protection, privacy and data protection rules, and privilege. According to the …
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Pensions: An employment lawyer’s guide to auto-enrolment

Christopher Hitchins and Kathryn Pickard examine the government’s scheme to encourage more workers to save for their retirement An employer must not offer a financial inducement (for example a higher salary or one-off bonus) to jobholders to encourage them to opt out of auto-enrolment. This October marked the start of mandatory pensions auto-enrolment for the …
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Shares For Rights: It’s employee ownership, chancellor, but not as we know it

Graeme Nuttall and Richard Kenyon analyse the government’s plan for employees to give up certain employment rights in return for shares in the company for which they work The risk of dismissal without remedy, coupled with the opportunity to benefit from an increase in share value, becomes doubly performance motivating. In his party conference speech, …
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Women On Boards: The justice commissioner and the men in dark suits

Are quotas imposed by the EU the best way to increase the number of female directors, asks Stephen Levinson Research by McKinsey & Company, carried out in 2007, claimed that companies with more women on their boards outperformed their rivals, with a 42% higher return on sales.The UK is at war with Europe, again. This …
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Equality Act: Red tape versus rights

Kevin Palmer considers the potential impact of the government’s plans to repeal three key anti-discrimination provisions 45,000 and 60,000 employer hours per year are being assigned to completing discrimination questionnaires. In the government’s view, this hinders business market freedom, with valuable man hours wasted on potentially spurious claims. Following separate reviews of equality legislation under …
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