Employment
After an unprecedented 18 months, IHL discovers the employment law issues that are keeping in-house counsel awake at night.
After a few video calls, it takes only a cursory kick of the tyres to discern that employment lawyers have had a crazy year. ‘Crazy’ almost does not cover it – you would be hard pressed to identify an area of law that experienced more change in the last year, in both the rate of new law being created and the transformation in advice that advisers found themselves giving.
After the calm before the storm in January and February, by March 2020 the word ‘furlough’ entered the English lexicon with a vengeance as entire industries went into lockdown as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Ranjit Dhindsa, head of employment at Fieldfisher recalls: ‘For us in employment, it’s been a crazy year. It’s not in statutes or case law, it was introduced without going through the normal processes. From March we had this weird situation where there would be government announcements on a Friday, which would ruin every employment and HR person’s weekend, then you’d have written Treasury guidance. And often they didn’t sit well together.’
