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Employment Law Advice?
For expert help in applying the law call us now on
01543 308642
Employment Law -
it’s ALL about application
Employment law is one of the newer legal areas in UK law and is evolving all the time as a result of Employment Tribunal and higher court decisions.
The law itself isn’t particularly complicated, although as with a lot of recent drafting there are certain areas that could be clearer. (we are still awaiting employment tribunal decisions to help us interpret some of the more recent changes! )
Employment law is all about people and that’s where the challenge lies. Almost everyone will behave differently in any given situation.
Applying employment law to your specific situation is what matters. Current teaching in law constantly stresses that it’s “all about the application” and a good thing too!
However, very few lawyers are actually trained to deal with the situations that business people find themselves in day in,day out and very few of them have EVER been in your shoes when you are handling an employee related dispute. Very few will have first hand experience of dealing with the confrontations that you face!
CLAIM CULTURE
Applying employment law well requires expertise, skill and experience. Look at the 2009/2010 Employment Tribunal Statistics and you begin to realise just how important it is to apply the law correctly.
Last year Employment Tribunals dealt with over 236,000 claims and this number rises every day – there are about 400,000 cases currently outstanding!
It is very difficult to tell you on a web page how to apply the law to the problem that you face right now. What we can tell you is that we deal with complicated issues on a daily basis, situations where one word in the wrong place in a letter can transform a perfectly reasonable situation into a potential disaster.
It is unfortunate that over recent years our world has become one driven by claims for this, that and the other, simply to try and extract payment from organisations who know that a pay-off may be cheaper than defending a claim.
The world isn’t full of clever, yet devious people who want to exploit every loop-hole for financial gain, but there are quite a few of them out there.
Over recent weeks we have come across bogus job appliants who claim that their job application was unsuccessful because of some form of discrimination – age, disability, race etc. A claim shortly follows and a business has a difficult decision to make – pay up or incur big legal cost to defend a principle. Some unscrupulous, but clever people are making quite a healthy living doing this type of thing.
It’s not nice, it’s hard to condone, but this is the world we live in.
The most sensible way to try and protect your business from such unnecessary risk is to work with experts to ensure that whatever you’re doing, you do it right.
Get it right first time, every time and help prevent potentially crippling costs at a later stage. Cleaning up a mess after it has happened is expensive, distracting, time consuming and unnecessary.
Employment Tribunals and government are very clear that they want to see business and employees try and reslove differences before they reach tribunal. The more that you can demonstrate that you reasonably tried to resolve a situation, the better your defence.
The way that the tribunal system works means that we can never prevent someone making a claim against you – the system doesn’t work like that. However, if you can demonstrate that you have done nothing wrong with clear and unequivocal evidence then it’s much easier to dismiss spurious claims before you get into the costly realms of tribunal.
INSURANCE INDEMNITY
A lot of business opt to be protected by some sort of insurance indemnity scheme to help in this area.
BEWARE – this approach may be flawed!
Insurance is about risk, so the advice you receive may not be aimed at helping you deal with your situation, it’s designed to prevent you (actually your insurer) from the risk of tribunal.
This may sound perfectly fair, after all you don’t want to be taken to tribunal. However the reality is that your advisers may be scared to deal with what they see as a diffcult situation because of the potential cost they may incur (they may not even have the expertise).
By using real experts in this area you won’t be fobbed off or un-insured if you decide not to take the advice (that’s years of paying a premium down the drain!)
Running your business effectively means that you can’t be scared of dealing with difficult situations whether they relate to people or not.
This is where we come in.
We have huge amounts of experience of effectively managing complicated situations, with outstanding results. We’re not scared of the challenges that we may face and will give simple, practical advice that helps you achieve the outcome you want.
Sometimes you call us too late and a situation is beyond redemption. At times like this we will still try to help you get the best you can from a bad situation. We’ve even helped organisations post tribunal to get awards reduced on appeal, even when we had nothing to do with the original case.
We’re not employment lawyers and we don’t pretend to be. We have access to the very best employment law to help us, to help you deal with any and every situation that you may face.
Looking back over the years, we’ve helped deal with so many different problems, from simple things that have gone wrong to incredibly complicated things that were never right in the first place.
If you would like help and advice on specific topics such as – Statutory Holiday Entitlement, Maternity & Paternity Rights, Suspension of employees on disciplinary or medical grounds, Promotions or Demotions, the legal requirement for work Breaks, Disability issues, the use of Social Media by your employees whilst at work, Sick leave, Overtime or Working hours regualtions, the use of Personal Mobile Phones at work, Pay and Pay rates, TUPE or if you have any questions or require advice, guidance or expertise on any HR or Employment Law related topic, please call us on 01543 308642 – Now!
One thing that your business really should know……..
We’ve never lost!
