The course provides a good overview of a number of areas of law, concentrating on the topics likely to be most useful to you in your day to day dealings with clients and staff. Employment law, in particular is an area subject to enormous change, particularly in the current economic climate, and the course covers a number of key areas and gives solid practical advice for the small employer, which of course may be you or your clients.  

Employers and professionals providing advice to small companies and directors of SMEs.

The main areas explored will be:

• Employment status
• Useful terms to include when drafting employment contracts
• Working time and minimum wage issues
• Discrimination including the impact of the age discrimination regulations and all the new cases
• Disability discrimination and dealing with sickness
• Changes to family friendly measures including maternity rights
• Developments in unfair dismissal
• Good redundancy process – what is redundancy and how can redundancies be handled properly?

The Companies Act 2006 implementation will be completed on 1st October 2009.  The course examines the main provisions affecting small practitioners.

• Directors duties and liabilities
• Share capital – implications of the changes in 2008 and 2009
• Protecting the minority in a small company
• The company’s constitution – where are we with the new provisions?
• Looking at articles of association after 1 October
• Important company law cases in the last 12 months

As far as time allows we will also look at

• Developments in data protection
• Professional negligence – new cases