Employment law

Industrial relations

The firm can advise on all legal aspects of industrial relations. The quality of the firm's experience in employment law has led it to "create the law" through its involvement with high-profile cases.

Know-how

• Collective redundancies in restructuring
• Advice with day-to-day employment issues including
  • setting up works councils representing employees
  • elections to the works councils and election disputes
  • health and safety
  • employment contracts
  • collective bargaining
• Agreements and negotiation of agreements
• Annual working hours agreements
• Employment Court and election disputes
• Redundancy schemes adopted in the course of recovery and insolvency proceedings
• Transfer of employees on the sale of a company
• Drafting and negotiating employment contracts

Recent industrial relations work

• Redundancy scheme adopted under the law on corporate recovery
• A dispute, during a strike, between a state company (the employees of which must give notice before any strike) and one of its security services suppliers, a private company, the employees of which have no obligation to give notice. The dispute was settled by the parties entering into a collective agreement.
• Dealing with employment rights in the context of a company whose change of business entailed a change in a collective agreement.
• Follow-up and ad hoc advice to large companies on all employment issues.
• Transfer of a business
• Election disputes affecting companies in the service and manufacturing industries
• Litigation between a company and a previous manager in the manufacturing industry

Industrial relations applied to restructuring

This expertise in the legal aspects of industrial relations dovetails with our experience in corporate restructuring. The Kuntz & Associés team can therefore provide advice and assistance to companies on all elements of the restructuring process, mergers and acquisitions and LBOs.

Know-how

• Redundancy schemes adopted under the law on corporate recovery and the new provisions
• The duty to reclassify employees

Recent industrial relations work in the context of restructurings

• Judicial receivership case
• Defending of a company against a site manager who declared himself de facto manager and then filing for bankruptcy.

Employment law relating to individual employees

In cases involving individuals, the firm works principally on litigation on behalf of employers or senior executives.

When acting on behalf of employers who are sued in the employment courts, the firm's success rate is high, despite the overall difficulty of defending employers before these courts.

The firm has a wealth of experience of transactions.

Sabine Rotkopf-Kuntz deals with a number of specific areas including the concept of "good faith and loyalty" in the performance of employment contracts and the termination of contracts where the employer suffers loss and co-employment litigation.