The Labour Relations Amendment (LRA) Act No.6 of 2014 came into effect on the 1st of January 2015. The amendments extend the LRA’s protection of qualifying ‘non-standard’ employees as well as expand the definition of ‘employer’. If preventative measures aren’t taken to protect against the potential impact of these amendments the client could be exposed to serious risk and cost implications. This is where EGL talks about offering its best service support.
The implication is that employers will need to audit their current workforce to identify which non-standard employee’s fall within the ambit of the act and then audit their independent contractor agreements (“IC agreements”) to identify those supplier relationships that are affected by the Amendment Act. Once the affected relationships have been identified, a strategy in mitigation of risk can be formulated. This strategy can be implemented by either amending the existing IC agreements or entering into new commercial agreements.
This sounds easy enough, but the reality is that many employers, particularly large corporates, will have to amend hundreds of agreements in order to safeguard against possible employment related claims. Approaching traditional law firms is not necessarily a viable option taking into account the scope of the project, the level of skill required and subsequently the legal costs that will have to be incurred.
A turnkey solution where the project can be outsourced to a LPO
LPO (Legal Process Outsourcing) in now an accepted means of legal services delivery. With its origins in the delivery of high volume, process-driven work streams like document review and legal administration tasks, LPO has evolved to include higher level, complex commercial work streams.
While the auditing and amendments of high volumes of contracts has the potential to overwhelm a client’s internal resources for an extended period of time or take a chunk out of the external legal spend budget, LPOs have the expertise and experience to deliver the project efficiently and cost effectively and with little to no impact on internal resource. They do this through the effective use of efficient resource and utilization models, tried and tested processes and technology.
With regulatory fatigue now a commonplace, corporates will be looking to LPOs as an effective way of ensuring compliance without wasting time and costs.
Written by Tjaart van der Walt – Associate at Exigent Group Limited
