Employment Contract Drafting, Writing and Review Services

Under section 1 of the Employment Rights Act 1996, every employee and worker must be given a written statement of the main terms of their employment on or before their first day of work. This is a legal minimum, not a best-practice suggestion, and it applies to part-time staff, casual staff and workers as well as full-time employees.

The written statement has to record the parties, the start date, the date continuous employment began, pay and pay intervals, hours and working patterns, holiday entitlement, place of work, job title or description, any probationary period and its conditions, training entitlements, sick pay, pensions, notice periods and details of any collective agreements. Most employers deal with this by issuing a full contract between employer and employee that contains the statutory particulars and everything else the business needs.

Failing to provide a compliant statement is not a free pass. If an employee brings a successful claim of another kind, a tribunal can award two or four weeks' pay on top for the missing statement. It is an avoidable cost, and it signals to a judge that the employer's paperwork is loose.

A new employee contract should be issued alongside the offer letter, not weeks after the person has started. Drafting it before the offer goes out lets you set expectations on probation, notice, restrictive covenants and confidentiality at the point the candidate is most willing to agree to them.

Our employment contract writing service builds the document around the actual role. A field engineer needs mobility and vehicle clauses. A salesperson needs commission terms with clear rules on what happens to commission on termination. A senior hire needs garden leave and a longer notice period. A generic new hire contract does none of that, and the gap only becomes visible when there is a dispute.

We also draft the surrounding documents so the pack is coherent: the offer letter, the agreement letter between employer and employee confirming acceptance, the right-to-work checklist and the probation review framework.

Most employers who come to us for employment contract advice already have something in place. The question is whether it still works. Contracts drafted before 2020 will not meet the current day-one written statement rules, will rarely mention hybrid or remote working, and often carry restrictive covenants copied from a much larger business.

Our employment contract review service reads every clause against current legislation and case law, then produces a report that grades each issue as urgent, recommended or optional. You get a clear picture of your exposure and a fixed quote to fix it. There is no obligation to have us do the redrafting.

If you need a lawyer to look over an employment contract quickly, such as when a senior candidate has returned a marked-up draft, we can turn around a review and a set of counter-drafting notes within two working days.

Moving existing staff onto new terms is the part employers most often get wrong. You cannot simply reissue a contract and treat silence as agreement. Imposing a change unilaterally risks claims for breach of contract, unlawful deduction from wages and, if an employee resigns, constructive unfair dismissal.

The safe route is consultation, a clear explanation of the business reason, individual meetings and written consent. Where consent is not forthcoming and the business case is strong, dismissal and re-engagement remains an option, but it is now governed by a statutory Code of Practice, and a tribunal can uplift compensation by up to 25% where the Code is unreasonably ignored.

Continuous employment is preserved when an existing employee signs a new contract with the same employer, so the new document should record the original start date as the date continuous employment began. Getting that date wrong affects redundancy pay, unfair dismissal qualification and notice entitlement.

Contract work rarely stops at the standard employee contract. We draft the wider suite of documents that sit around the employment relationship, so the terms are consistent and nothing contradicts anything else.

That includes consultancy and contractor agreements drafted with employment status and IR35 in mind, recruitment service agreements with agencies, service agreements between employer and employee at board level, and settlement agreements where an exit needs to be documented cleanly. As an employment settlement agreement solicitor service, we can act on the employer side and advise on the statutory conditions the agreement must satisfy to be binding.