Labour and employment lawyers advise employers and appear in disputes about dismissals, contracts and workplace conduct. They deal with sensitive people matters daily, so their own team and records must be handled with more care than most.
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Share your requirementsA labour and employment practice advises companies on contracts, policies, inquiries, terminations and settlements, and appears before labour courts and tribunals. A partner or senior advocate leads, with associates who draft opinions, notices and replies, paralegals and clerks who prepare bundles and track dates, and sometimes a consultant who reviews company policies. The work mixes advisory calls from anxious employers with slower dispute files that run for years. Clients bring staff files, complaint records and pay data, so confidentiality is constant. Juniors must learn to write plainly, to read a client's facts critically and to hold a position under pressure. Hearings are scattered across places, and travel is part of the week. Associates are drawn to company legal teams and HR departments. See also HR for law firms.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in labour and employment lawyers. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
A client wants to dismiss someone tomorrow, and the associate drops the drafting that was due today.
Matters pass between juniors as people leave, and the history lives in a few people's memory.
Complaint files and pay data move by email and chat, and nobody has decided who may keep copies.
Opinions are checked by a single partner, and the bottleneck lengthens as the practice grows.
There is no regular review of what went well or badly, and mistakes surface only when a client complains.
Matters in different benches pull people away, and office work waits.
A long relationship leads to informal calls that are never recorded or billed, and the hours go unseen.
Companies offer fixed hours and a stable pay to lawyers who know employment matters.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Learning and Development; HR Operations and Governance; Retention and Attrition Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for professional services, not in general.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
The pieces a labour and employment lawyers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A duty associate each day for urgent calls, so others protect their drafting time.
A duty associate each day for urgent calls, so others protect their drafting time. Plan cover with leave rules.
A running summary of facts, orders, next dates and instructions kept with each matter.
A running summary of facts, orders, next dates and instructions kept with each matter. Hold it in your documentation.
Who may hold client staff files, how they are shared, how long they are kept and what happens when a person leaves.
Who may hold client staff files, how they are shared, how long they are kept and what happens when a person leaves. Include it in onboarding.
A checklist for common opinions and notices, and two reviewers with clear sign-off limits, so the partner sees only the hard cases.
A checklist for common opinions and notices, and two reviewers with clear sign-off limits, so the partner sees only the hard cases.
A monthly session on a few matters: what the client asked, what was advised and what happened.
A monthly session on a few matters: what the client asked, what was advised and what happened. Capture lessons in learning plans.
A simple log of calls and quick opinions, so time is visible and fees can reflect it.
A simple log of calls and quick opinions, so time is visible and fees can reflect it. Review pay by stage with it.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Duty rotas and cover for hearing days and urgent calls.
File notes, role descriptions and handover records that outlast any one person.
New staff learn confidentiality and file rules before touching client records.
Regular case reviews that build judgement in juniors.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in professional services, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Why associates and managers leave consulting, accounting, legal and advisory firms, and how to ask about progression, workload and partners at exit.
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A founder's guide to hiring freshers and running a first-year programme: campus or open drives, a screening round, a training plan by quarter, mentors and checkpoints.
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Every growing company reaches a point where the founder approving everything stops being speed and starts being the bottleneck. Twelve signs it has happened, and what to fix first.
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What really keeps mobile app and web developers in a small firm: stay conversations, growth paths, fair release rules and a risk sheet an owner can use this month.
6 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Name a duty associate each day for urgent matters and let others work undisturbed. Change the duty weekly so the load is shared.
Keep a running summary with dates, orders and instructions in each file. Anyone taking over should understand it in an hour.
Decide who may hold them, limit sharing, set retention and removal rules and brief everyone at joining. Confirm client confidentiality duties with a qualified professional.
Review real matters together, ask why a choice was made and note what you would do differently. Judgement grows from talking about decisions, not from drafts alone.
Log calls and quick opinions for a few months. The record shows how much time goes unpaid and supports a fair fee conversation.
How urgent and planned work are split, how files are handed over, who sees sensitive records and why associates leave. A duty rota, a file note format or a case-review habit is a likely start. Scope, timing and fees are put in writing after that talk.
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