Employee Contracts & HR Policies for Modern Day Businesses

An offer letter that has not been reviewed in years. An employment contract for an executive class employee that has never been tested outside the company. A remote work policy that was drawn up during the pandemic but has not seen the light of day since. Statutory registers that exist because some years ago it was reported that the business needed them. Together, these make up the often overlooked set of documents that define the relationship between a company and its employees, most of which are only put to the test long after they have been created. Would a non-compete clause in an executive's contract truly be upheld in court? Does a gig worker contract truly capture an independent contractor, or is it indistinguishable from an employment contract? Are statutory employee registers reflective of the law as on date, especially now that it is no longer a future possibility but a present reality with the codes coming into force in November 2025? Does a termination process leave a business open to a wrongful termination claim it did not anticipate? These are questions that are seldom asked before any of these documents are drafted or revised.

A contract drawn up at the time of hiring is rarely looked at again after that. A policy, when drawn up to address a specific set of circumstances, rarely evolves beyond that point. The danger is not that these initial documents got it wrong. It is that nothing has been updated as the company, the workforce, and the law have evolved. Corrida Legal's expertise lies in keeping this entire corpus of documents current and defensible, from the offer letter through the dispute resolution process.

We assist in drafting, reviewing, and updating offer letters, appointment letters, and employment contracts to ensure compliance with current labour laws, including the insertion of confidentiality, non-disclosure, and data protection clauses as appropriate. A manufacturing company standardising its hiring processes across its various facilities recently needed exactly this kind of support, a single consistent contract framework rather than a different version at every site. Senior staff and expatriate contracts raise their own issues entirely, foreign employment law, tax treatment, and cross-border compliance rarely sit comfortably inside a template built for domestic hires, which is why a technology company came to us needing extensive support localising an overseas executive's contract to Indian law.

Hiring documentation is only half the picture. We also assist in drafting termination letters, separation agreements, and performance improvement plans, and in designing retrenchment and severance processes end to end, having recently supported a retail chain through exactly this, building a new process from scratch rather than adapting an old one that no longer fit. Restrictive covenants bring a different set of questions. When a fintech company needed to protect its client relationships and trade secrets from senior employees who might leave and join a competitor, the work involved advising on non-compete and non-solicitation clauses, retention bonuses, and stock option structures that would actually hold up, not merely look complete on paper.

Statutory compliance tends to be where gaps hide longest. We ensure records, payroll structures, and related documentation are maintained in line with current law, work that recently took the shape of a full review for a logistics company operating across multiple states, checking that every register and filing reflected the law as it now stands rather than as it stood when the templates were first drafted. Internal HR policies need the same scrutiny. A hospitality company wanted its entire policy suite, leave, attendance, anti-harassment, grievance redressal, brought fully up to date, both with the law and with its own ambitions as an equal opportunity employer, and we assisted in drafting and updating each of these. And sometimes the starting point is simply an audit, as it was for an IT services company that wanted its cybersecurity and data privacy policies reviewed alongside its broader HR framework, so that gaps could be identified and closed before an inspection found them first.