In response to COVID-19, the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs issued new occupational health and safety standards effective 16 April 2020. These standards apply directly and immediately to all companies where work is still being carried out or is being carried out on site again. The occupational health and safety standards are not … Read more

The ECJ has followed the Opinion of EU Advocate General Pitruzzella in ruling that, under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the EU Working Time Directive, member states must require employers to set up an “objective, reliable and accessible” system for recording the actual number and distribution of hours worked by individual workers each … Read more

In RE v Praxair MRC SAS the European Court of Justice has ruled that the calculation of compensation payments for dismissal and redeployment of an employee on a full-time contract, who was on part-time parental leave (as permitted under French law), must be carried out on the basis of the full-time salary.  Calculating these payments based on … Read more

Where disputes involve individual employment contracts, EU jurisdiction rules provide that the employee can only be sued where they are domiciled. In Bosworth v Arcadia Petroleum, the ECJ has ruled that for an individual to have an employment relationship for these purposes, they must perform services for and under the direction of another person, implying the … Read more

On 23 November 2018, the European Data Protection Board published its draft guidelines on Article 3 of the GDPR, being the provision that sets out the territorial scope of Europe’s data protection legislation. The GDPR seeks (via Article 3) to extend its reach beyond European borders, making non-EU organisations directly subject to its obligations when processing … Read more

Our article Recruitment and protection of talent: a boardroom issue for pharma is available on our pharma hub here. Technological advancement is key amongst the forces driving change in the pharmaceutical healthcare sectors, with businesses increasingly partnering with non-traditional players such as tech giants, agile biotech start-ups and insurers. In this article we explore how the … Read more

The Global Pound Conference (GPC) Series is a unique and ambitious initiative to inform how civil and commercial disputes are resolved in the 21st century, collating views from over 4000 people at 28 conferences spanning 24 countries worldwide. Herbert Smith Freehills teamed up with PwC, IMI (International Mediation Institute) to identify key insights emerging from the extensive … Read more

The European Commission has published a new draft directive to strengthen whistleblower protection across the EU.  The proposal is to provide EU-wide protection for blowing the whistle on breaches of specified types of EU legislation (for example, legislation on financial services, public health and safety, data protection and competition rules), although Member States are encouraged … Read more