Employment law for
future industries.

Practical employment advice for businesses building what comes next. Whether your team is writing software, assembling launch vehicles or commissioning clean energy projects, we help you engage people properly, keep pace with a fast-moving regulatory agenda, and resolve disputes before they become the main event.

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Employment advice for the
businesses building tomorrow.

Emerging-industry employers compete for scarce talent with small teams, equity incentives and flexible ways of working. Each of those choices has an employment law dimension; we help you get them right from the start, before the headcount makes them expensive to unwind.

Built for how new industries hire

Engineers on annualised salaries, specialists engaged as contractors, equity in place of cash bonuses, and teams that span State borders. We advise on the full hiring toolkit used by technology, space, clean energy and advanced manufacturing businesses, and we flag where the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) treats your arrangements differently from how you intended them.

The full employment lifecycle

Our practitioners assist with employment agreements and contractor arrangements, Modern Award coverage, employee share schemes, workplace policies, restructures and redundancy, and representation before the Fair Work Commission and the Federal Courts.

01/03

Foundations

Employment agreements, worker classification, Award coverage, equity incentives and the protections that keep your IP where it belongs.

See the foundations
02/03

Disputes

Unfair dismissal, general protections and underpayment matters, run digitally and settled early where settlement is the better outcome.

See dispute capability
03/03

Digital onboarding

Digitise employee onboarding, employment compliance and payroll; technology implementation backed by legal services from one operator.

See the tech approach

Get the foundations right
before the headcount grows.

Most employment problems in young companies trace back to decisions made at the point of hiring: the wrong engagement model, a borrowed template, an Award nobody checked. We help you build an employment stack that satisfies the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) as the team scales.

Engagement and classification

Whether someone is an employee or an independent contractor now turns on the real substance and practical reality of the relationship, not the label on the contract. We help you choose the right engagement model for each role and document it properly, including under the newer rules for casual employment and the limits on fixed-term contracts.

Modern Award coverage

Award coverage reaches further than many founders expect; professional employees such as engineers and IT specialists are often covered even on comfortable salaries. We map your roles against the Award system and the National Employment Standards, and structure annualised salaries and set-off clauses so they actually do their job.

Equity and incentives

Scarce cash and scarce talent make employee share schemes a natural fit for emerging companies. We design and document employee share option plans, advise on the start-up tax concessions that make them workable, and make sure the plan rules and the employment agreement tell the same story about vesting, leavers and termination.

Protecting your IP and your team

For most future-industries businesses, the real asset walks out the door each evening. We draft the intellectual property assignment, confidentiality and restraint provisions that protect what your people create. We draft with one eye on the announced reform that would prevent non-compete clauses for employees below the high income threshold; well before it lands, your protection strategy should rest on confidentiality and non-solicitation rather than on a restraint a court may never enforce.

Keeping pace with reform

Employment regulation has moved quickly in recent years. Intentional underpayment of wages is now a criminal offence, superannuation moves to payday-aligned payment from mid-2026, and the right to disconnect now extends to small business employers. We translate each change into concrete updates to your contracts, policies and payroll settings, so compliance keeps up with the law rather than chasing it.

Resolve disputes quietly,
and get back to building.

Employment disputes are serious, but most can be resolved without a hearing. We take a settlement-first, digitally run approach to matters in the Fair Work Commission and the Federal Courts; the goal is the outcome that lets you get back to work, not the longest possible fight.

If it can settle, it will

Many employment disputes resolve through conciliation or mediation without a contested hearing. Our practitioners prioritise alternative dispute resolution and work to settle matters early, because the cheapest dispute is the one that ends before formal proceedings begin. We don't subscribe to the philosophy that the lawyers win if the dispute takes longer to resolve.

Unfair dismissal and general protections

We advise on performance management and termination before you act, and defend unfair dismissal and general protections claims when they arrive. General protections claims deserve particular care; compensation is uncapped, and they reach conduct (such as how a complaint was handled) that employers often don't recognise as adverse action until a claim is filed.

Restructures and redundancy

Funding rounds, pivots and project completions all force workforce changes. We guide you through genuine redundancy requirements, consultation obligations under Modern Awards, and the documentation that keeps a necessary restructure from turning into an unfair dismissal claim.

Underpayment and regulator engagement

Underpayment has become the sharpest compliance risk in Australian employment law, with criminal liability attaching to intentional conduct. If you find a problem (or the Fair Work Ombudsman finds it first), we help you quantify the shortfall, remediate it, and manage the engagement with the regulator.

Get straight to business.

Whether you're hiring your first employee, papering an option plan or defending an unfair dismissal claim; leave us a short message and we'll come back with our view of the next steps.

We're standing by

Drop us a short message about your matter and we'll come right back with what we view as the next steps.

Free digital consultation

We offer a free digital consultation via videoconference. Schedule it using your own conferencing system if you prefer; just drop a link in the form.

Fast, fair pricing

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