Linklaters’ employment and incentives team is the clear market leader with a 150-strong team around the world.
Linklaters’ global reach allows the firm to advise the world’s leading companies and financial institutions on their share plans and tax requirements. Multi-jurisdictional expertise includes plan design and structure, corporate transactions, regulatory issues, tax (both individual and corporate), corporate governance, employment issues, trusts and data protection.
The global team’s cutting-edge advice on day-to-day issues includes contracts and terminations, recruitment and retention, employee transfers, discrimination and dismissal, works councils, health and safety and immigration.
Transactional work is central to Linklaters’ global employment and incentives practice. The team has advised on the employment and incentives issues affecting a number of the world’s most significant recent M&A transactions.
In contentious employment cases, Linklaters’ advocates appear in all employment courts, defending discrimination and dismissal claims. The firm also handles relatively new areas of employment law, such as sexual orientation, stress and whistle-blowing.
The team uses a client extranet and on-line legal service, Blue Flag® Employee Share Plans, to provide access to up to date employee share plans advice, covering over 100 countries. The team’s familiarity with all recent share plan developments emphasises its commitment to best practice in this area.
In conjunction with the ICSA, Linklaters has developed the only professional employee share plan qualification in the UK. The ICSA certificate in Employee Share Plan (link opens in a new window) has run for five years, with nearly 300 people successfully completing the course.
We have also developed a separate website to introduce you to the Linklaters employee incentives team and to give you fingertip access to share plan information and reference sources which we think might be useful. Click here to access the Employee Incentives Shareknowledge site (link opens in a new window).
Recent employee incentives transactions include advising
- Citi, Morgan Stanley, RBS, UBS and Deutsche Bank on a global compliance programme for share plans in over 80 countries
- ADP on the launch of share plans across Europe, working across all key EU jurisdictions to identify ADP’s home member state and to prepare and file a 372-page prospectus
- lead consortium member RBS on the take-over of ABN AMRO and the incentive related issues.
Recent employment transactions include advising
- Commerzbank in their high profile bonus dispute case against James Keen
- the various administrators on the employment aspects on the administrations of Lehman Brothers, Woolworths and Waterford Wedgewood
