Blog
From garage to unicorn – Employment law lessons for scaling tech teams
Catherine Bourne
27 January 2016
Are you ready for the Senior Managers Regime?
From 7 March 2016 the Senior Managers and Certification regimes will be in force. The overall aim is to improve accountability for individuals working in financial services. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) will require firms to map out the roles of their senior managers and to allocate responsibilities to them so as to make them individually accountable.
26 January 2016
Own goal for Sunderland AFC’s marketing director: a warning against “banking” company documents for future reference
Ever been tempted to surreptitiously e-mail yourself a couple of documents from work, just in case? Maybe you want them as evidence of your past experience when moving roles; or maybe you think you will need to use them against your employer at some point in the future? Well don’t! And remember this case next time you are tempted.
21 January 2016
Case update: Are subsequent events relevant to whether a task was intended to be of short term duration?
Employment Appeal Tribunal ("The EAT"), in allowing an appeal in the case of ICTS UK Ltd v Mahdi and others, has held that subsequent events may be relevant in assessing the client’s intention as to whether or not a task was intended to be of “short-term duration”.
20 January 2016
The Courts have now clarified that employers can “snoop” on their employees e-mails. Or have they…
The decision of the European Court of Human Rights last week appeared to answer a difficult question for employers, namely are they able to snoop on their employees' electronic communications to check they are complying with their email / electronic communications policies? In that case, the answer had been “yes”, because a fair balance had been struck between the employee's right to respect for his private life on the one hand, and his employer's interests, such as to check for potential damage to their IT systems, illicit activity in the company's name or the leaking of company secrets, on the other.
14 January 2016
Exercising discretion when awarding bonuses
The recent High Court decision in Patural v DB Services (UK) Ltd is an illustration of the principles on which the courts will examine an employer’s exercise of their discretion in awarding bonuses. The employee’s claim that his employer had exercised this discretion improperly in awarding him a smaller bonus than his colleagues was dismissed without proceeding to full trial.