Do you run a small business?
Are you looking for an employment lawyer in Derby?
If you run a small business and are looking for an employment lawyer in Derby, you no doubt found this page after searching for ‘employment lawyer Derby’, ‘Derby employment law advice’, or such like. It’s perfectly logical to look for an employment lawyer to give employment law advice. It’s just that it might not be the best way to get the employment related legal help you need for your business.
So, why might you be looking for employment law advice?
First employees
Offer letters, employment contracts, staff handbooks
Perhaps you’re seeking employment law advice because you’re taking on your first employee and want to avoid the many potential legal pitfalls relating to discrimination within job interviews. Or maybe you’ve just found the ideal person to join your team, but need expert help with an offer letter, right to work checks, contact of employment, staff handbook, and the numerous other legal documents that a new employee requires.
Managing people
Performance management, absence management, appraisals, grievances, disciplinaries, dismissals
Or you could be looking for an employment law expert to advise you on the tricky employment law issues that will inevitably crop up as your business grows. Often the person who ends up being responsible for looking after the workforce within a fast-growing small business is from a non-legal background, and can rapidly feel overwhelmed and out of their depth. Whilst fine with sorting out day-to-day people issues, your in-house managers simply may not have the experience, knowledge, or formal training necessary to feel confident in dealing with more complex cases involving employment law.
Motivating people
Flexible working, working time, family friendly policies, inclusivity, diversity, reward strategies, learning & development
Employees are a significant cost to any business, but even more so with a new one, so you’ll want to get the best out of them. Whilst it makes sense to have a happy and motivated workforce in order to maximise productivity and minimise staff turnover, many policies relating to employee well-being are also mandated by employment legislation. Do you know your legal obligations relating to maternity, paternity, and other child-care or family related matters? Would you know how to deal with an employee undergoing gender reassignment? Or suffering from mental health issues, disability, or long-term sickness? Or having a criminal conviction?
An experienced employment law advisor will be able to help you deal with such issues.
Growing and changing companies
Restructuring, mergers, acquisitions, redundancies
As your business evolves, change is inevitable, whether you’re expanding, downsizing , or restructuring as a response to changing markets. These are typically going to involve changes to contracts of employment, such as a TUPE transfers that result from mergers and acquisitions. Likewise, if you’re downsizing, it’s important to follow the correct process for carrying out redundancies.
That’s why you need expert employment law advice.
Protecting your business
Employee disputes, employment tribunals, mediation, settlements, compromise agreements
Perhaps you need employment law advice as you’re concerned about threats to your business. Employee disputes and employment tribunals can be extremely costly, time-consuming, and disruptive to your company. An experienced employment law advisor can help you with mediation and compromise so as to avoid litigation. Or provide expert advice on how to create enforceable restraint-of-trade clauses within employment contracts to prevent ex-employees from setting up in competition or poaching clients.
Legal compliance
Keeping up to date with employment law changes
Even once you have everything in place, it’s important to stay up to date with employment law.
Every year sees the UK implement new European Union directives relating to employment legislation, as well as new interpretations of existing legislation arising from test cases, so it’s crucial to ensure that your employment contracts, policies and procedures remain legally compliant.
Do you know the implications of recent employment law cases?
- Lock v British Gas [2014]
- Bear Scotland v Fulton [2014]
- Federacion de Servicios Privados v Tyco Integrated Security [2015]
Or how your business will be affected by recent employment legislation changes?
- Pensions Act 2008
- Modern Slavery Act 2015
- The National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Regulations 2016
Do you know the financial and reputational consequences of non-compliance, and how to mitigate against these risks?
We do!
We’re in Derby but we’re not employment lawyers
So then, who and what are we?
We’re Loates HR Consultancy, a human resources consultancy based in Derby city centre, and we’re not employment lawyers. But we nevertheless know a lot about employment law, as we deal with employment law issues every day.
We specialise in helping small businesses manage their staff, get the best from their workforce, reduce legal and business risk, and stay legally compliant. Most of all, we help employers achieve their business objectives.
Employment contracts, staff handbooks, performance management, disciplinaries and grievances, and the like are our bread and butter. That’s what we spend every day doing. We deal with all stages of the employee lifecycle, from recruitment, through maximising performance, to managing exit.
We’ve got over 20 years’ experience of providing HR support and advice, and dealing with employment law issues. Our consultants have worked with businesses with one single employee, and also those with tens of thousands. We’ve helped work-from-home startups, and major corporations with numerous sites in multiple countries. We’ve worked with companies across a wide range of sectors, including service, manufacturing, charity, and academic. We’ve dealt with the special challenges that occur within unionised industries, as well as those within family-owned businesses.
This experience means that we’ll be able to help you with your employment law issues, because we’ve almost certainly done something similar before.
What’s that you say? Employment lawyers are smart and highly qualified? But so are we! Within our small team we have a doctorate, several masters degrees, multiple undergraduate degrees, professional qualifications in human resource management, pensions auto-enrolment, teaching, psychometric testing, … And we have expertise a wide range of fields too. Between us we’re at least degree level qualified in human resources, business, psychology, sociology, …
Need a Derby employment lawyer? Think again!
We’re not saying that Derby employment lawyers won’t do a fine job advising you on employment law. Indeed, we work alongside and have great business relationships with many of them. It’s just that we think we can offer you a few things that they can’t. Consequently, just searching for a ‘Derby employment lawyer’ to advise you on employment law could be limiting your options somewhat.
Firstly, and most importantly, we’ll provide exactly the same level of high quality service and professionalism and that you’d expect from an employment lawyer.
But on top of this, we’re also down-to-earth, friendly, and approachable.
We understand how intimidating employment legislation can be, and how difficult and stressful it is to effectively manage staff whilst constantly worrying about falling foul of unknown legal pitfalls.
Consequently, we won’t just reel off the facts relating to some Euro directive in a barrage of jargon and legalese. We’ll translate it all into plain English, and tell you what you actually need to do in practice – no nonsense, straight talking, hands-on. You’ll get help that’s not just legally sound, but also pragmatic, business focussed, and aimed at achieving your end goal. And we won’t just tell you what you should be doing, then step back and let you get on with it. We’ll guide you through the process every step of the way. We can be physically present on site to give you the support you need, or actually carry out the necessary work for you.
And then there’s the price.
We know that price isn’t everything, but being a small business ourselves, we understand that difficult financial decisions need to be made concerning what to spend money on, and consequently the importance of value for money. We’re therefore proud to provide high quality employment law advice that’s also extremely cost effective. We’ll almost certainly be much cheaper than an employment lawyer for routine jobs such as employee contracts, staff handbooks, handling disciplinaries and grievances, and so on.
Check it out! Just ask Mr Google how much a contract of employment costs from an employment lawyer. Then give us a ring. We’d be extremely surprised indeed if we couldn’t beat that price.
And we care about you.
We’re not some mega-corporation, where your custom is trivial compared with that of our other clients. Small and medium sized businesses like yours are our target market, so you’re important to us. Conversely though, we’re not a one-man-band. Our team is big enough to provide a high level of availability, and fast response times when that emergency occurs where you need advice right now. We’re big enough to effectively deal with your employment law issues, but still small enough care. We’re not interested in just selling you some document template and letting you get on with it. We want to establish a long-term relationship, where you deal face-to-face with real people, and we get to know more about each other.
So, hold back on that ‘employment lawyers Derby’ search. Remember that successfully dealing with your employment law issues could depend on not just getting good advice, but on also having the necessary support to carry it through.
Just take a look at what our clients are saying.
And despite our retained service agreements having no minimum periods or tie-ins, we still continue work with our very first client after many years.
Which suggests that we’re doing something right.
Have a chat with us about employment law
So, drop us an email, give us a ring, or pop round our Derby city centre offices for a cup of tea, and have a chat with us about how we can help you with your employment law issues.
We’re not after the quick win of a one off-job, so there’ll be absolutely no pressure at all to engage us to do any work.
Go on, what have you got to lose!