IEL Elite

Overview

Regional powerhouse Tilleke & Gibbins boasts a highly recommended employment offering, which is able to advise clients from its offices in Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam.

One of the best employment practices in South-East Asia.

Aside from assisting its own client base, the team is a go-to for leading international firms without a local footprint, with instructions regularly coming from nearby Hong Kong and Singapore and from as far as the UK and US.

Chusert Supasitthumrong and Pimvimol (June) Vipamaneerut in Bangkok lead the firm’s non-contentious and contentious employment practices, respectively.

Other key names include Jay Cohen in Phnom Penh, Dino Santaniello in Vientiane, and Yuwadee Thean-ngarm in Yangon.

Specialisms

The team offers a full spectrum of employment law services – from day-to-day matters through to staff retrenchment.

Notably, the team’s client roster includes household names from the life sciences and TMT sectors in particular. For example, Lenovo Singapore is a long-standing client that the department regularly advises on labour contracts, dismissals, and overtime concerns.

In the past 12 months, this advice has also frequently encompassed issues relating to the covid-19 pandemic. A team led by Vipamaneerut in Bangkok advised Warner Media on how to bring employees safely back to the workplace amid the covid-19 pandemic. This included addressing data privacy concerns relating to employees’ vaccination status, and how the client could manage employees who refuse to disclose vaccination or infection status.

The group is adept at taking on issues resulting from strategic corporate decisions, such as contract terminations relating to acquisition projects, and downsizing operations. The firm’s expertise in this area was recently demonstrated in advice given to a leading French life sciences company on its redundancy programme, owing to the corporate restructuring of the client’s Vietnamese operations.

Other areas of expertise include secondment and outsourcing agreements, as well as hiring staff to work in countries where the client does not have a business entity – including through professional employer organisations.

The advice they give is consistently good quality.

The department is well placed to assist with sensitive contentious issues, such as those relating to unions. Members of the Bangkok team, for example, are licensed to negotiate directly with unions, meaning that the group is regularly appointed to represent clients in collective bargaining processes. The wider department’s recent experience in contentious issues includes disputes relating to wrongful dismissal claims and restrictive covenants.

Expertise also extends to whistleblowing and investigations, including those into allegations of workplace bullying. For example, the US parent company of a NYSE-listed chemical manufacturer instructed a team led by Kien Trung Trinh in Hanoi to advise on allegations made via a whistleblower hotline. The whistleblower argued that they had been wrongfully dismissed and that the company had been exporting low-quality goods.

Clients