Employment and HR Legal Advisory

What this covers

Every business with employees carries legal obligations that run quietly in the background, until a termination goes wrong, a workplace complaint arises, or a compliance gap surfaces during an audit or a funding round. Employment and HR law covers the relationship between a business and its people, from how that relationship is structured at the outset to how disputes are handled if it breaks down.

This area has just changed more than at any point in decades. Four new Labour Codes, replacing twenty-nine older laws including the Industrial Disputes Act, the Minimum Wages Act and the Payment of Gratuity Act, came into force in late 2025, with the detailed rules notified only recently, in mid-2026. Implementation is uneven across states, some have finalised their own rules, many have not, and the changes carry immediate practical consequences, including a new wage definition that is already forcing businesses to restructure how salaries are calculated. Businesses that have not yet reviewed their payroll and HR practices against this new framework are operating with real, current exposure.

Beyond this transition, the core areas of employment practice remain constant. Workplace policies and HR frameworks, compliance with the Prevention of Sexual Harassment Act, which applies to any organisation with ten or more employees regardless of sector, termination and severance handled correctly, and disputes over non-compete or confidentiality obligations are all matters that recur across a business's life, not one-time concerns.

As work itself has changed, so have the questions. Gig and platform-based work now carries its own emerging social security obligations under the new framework. Remote and hybrid arrangements raise questions about jurisdiction and policy that older employment templates rarely addressed. Getting these right at the policy stage prevents them becoming disputes later.

A note on scope: straightforward offer letters and standard employment agreements are handled as part of our contract drafting work. This page covers everything around that document, compliance advisory, policy design, workplace investigations, and disputes, since these call for a different kind of judgment than drafting alone. As with the rest of this site, guidance here is general; labour law varies by state and by the nature of the establishment, and any matter should be assessed on its specific facts.