Law firms were last week warned to act now and put in place voluntary arrangements on staff information and consultation rules so as to prevent rigid obligations being imposed on them.

City firm Trowers & Hamlins said that if firms wait until a request for information is made by employees, they are likely to find they have less flexibility in the terms they can agree on what and how information should be disclosed.


The Information and Consultation Regulations 2004, which come into force on 6 April 2005, give employees rights to be informed and consulted about the businesses they work for, including law firms.


Initially, the regulations will apply to undertakings with more than 150 employees but will be phased in to cover firms with 50 employees by 6 April 2008.


The regulations provide for three types of agreements that can be reached between the employer and the employees. A voluntary agreement, made before the regulations come into force, gives firms the most freedom and falls largely outside the statutory framework.


Second, a mechanism for consultation can be negotiated once a request for information has been made. Finally, if no agreement is reached following a request, a default agreement will be imposed according to prescriptive provisions in the regulations.


Examples of information that may need to be disclosed under the default provisions include technological developments which could affect the business, mergers, redundancies, recruitment and training.


Rada Kemp, a senior employment solicitor at Trowers’ Manchester office, said that although these rules have been on the cards since March 2002 – when the European directive establishing the general framework for informing and consulting employees came into force – some employers have not even begun to think about the issue.


‘The new regulations formalise the way employers communicate with their staff, which is something many employers do to quite a large extent anyway as good practice,’ she said, adding: ‘Employers need to act now, if they haven’t already done so, in order not to lose their ability to chose the amount and type of information and consultation arrangements they wish to adopt.’


Richard Lamb, an employment assistant at London firm Olswangs, said: ‘Law firms will be aware that they will not have a great deal of leverage once the regulations come into force.’


He advised that if practices set up a pre-existing agreement, there are certain requirements that firms must comply with – for instance, the agreement must cover the whole of the workforce, but there are no minimum terms they need to include or amounts of information they need to disclose.

‘If you have in place such an agreement, you set the limit, and you can refuse to disclose prejudicial information. But under the regulations, employees would be obliged to disclose a wide range of information,’ he said.