Employer Counseling

The bread and butter of our practice is providing timely advice to employers to help them achieve their business goals while managing the many risks associated with their workforces. As experienced litigators who live with the kinds of problems that wind up in the courtroom, we are acutely familiar with the decisions that ultimately lead to significant time and expense and potential exposure down the road. Our job is to listen, apply our judgment and experience, and provide practical and creative ways to minimize the risk associated with those problems. We provide management with real-time, practical advice, whether facing a single difficult termination or a complex multi-jurisdictional restructuring; an employee with habitual absences who suddenly has asked to take medical leave or employees threatening a wage and hour class action; or notice of a government investigation or the need for an internal investigation into potential discrimination, harassment, and/or ethical concerns. We understand that employers need timely, creative, and proactive advice, not memos educating them on the law that do not solve the problem at hand.

In addition to providing prompt advice on daily problems, we help employers protect their most critical assets and intellectual property by drafting and counseling on all forms of employment agreements, including executive compensation and stock option agreements, restrictive covenant (non-competition, non-solicitation, and non-disclosure) agreements, company property and trade secret agreements, and severance agreements. Having negotiated and litigated these agreements in many settings and venues, we are ready to help clients protect their assets up front and respond swiftly and appropriately whenever a competitor threatens those assets. We also regularly advise on and draft “best practices” manuals, policies and procedures, and all forms of compensation plans that impact the workforce. We provide related management training on those policies and plans to promote consistency and compliance. As part of our compliance services, we offer a wide range of audits, from targeted issue reviews, such as wage and hour audits, to comprehensive reviews of all aspects of a company’s human resources operations. The purpose of any review, whether small or large, is to identify and address issues on the front end so that remedial measures may be taken before these issues develop into lawsuits, agency investigations, and fines.

We frequently advise clients on issues that cross state and national borders, called on to assist multi-jurisdictional clients with the restructuring of their workforces, guiding the process from the initial planning phase to implementation to post-implementation risk management. We have extensive experience managing restructurings across more than 20 states and abroad, as well as restructurings that impact unionized and non-unionized workforces.

We have helped hundreds of foreign-based companies manage their employees located in the U.S., from the initial start-up phase to rapid expansion. Our practice is national, having assisted clients with matters touching on every state and having represented clients in courtrooms in nearly every state.

We benefit significantly from our membership as the exclusive Georgia firm in the Employment Law Alliance, an international network of prominent management-side employment law practitioners with a presence in every state of the country and in over 100 countries. We welcome you to visit the Employment Law Alliance website to learn more about how we better support our multi-national clients, including by providing them with regular webinars and free publications accessible through our firm.