Outsourced employment counsel for Peru

Many foreign-owned companies in Peru are too large to manage employment matters without legal support and too small to justify a full-time employment lawyer. The usual result is a series of separate instructions, each answered well but none connected to the others, and no one keeping track of the obligations that come around every year. Outsourced employment counsel on retainer addresses that gap.

The business problem

A Peruvian entity faces a steady stream of employment questions: new hires and contract types, bonuses and allowances, schedules and overtime, discipline and exits. It also faces a calendar: CTS deposits (the severance fund the employer pays into a bank account in the employee’s name) in May and November, gratificaciones (statutory bonuses) in July and December, annual safety training and risk assessment, and the thresholds that trigger new obligations as headcount grows.

At the same time, incidents arrive without warning. An inspector from SUNAFIL, Peru’s national labor inspection authority, can visit unannounced; an employee can file a complaint; a manager can take a decision that needs immediate correction. When the company has no standing adviser, the first hours are spent finding one. Our guide to employment compliance in Peru sets out the obligations such an arrangement is designed to keep under control.

How we approach it

The arrangement starts with onboarding. We review the entity’s workforce, contracts, policies, open issues and relationship with the group, and agree how questions will reach us, who can raise them and how quickly they will be answered.

We then set up the annual calendar, based on our employment compliance calendar, adapted to the entity’s size and activity. From there, we act as the company’s employment legal function: answering questions, drafting documents, reviewing decisions before they are taken and responding first when an incident arises. If an inspector appears, the local team already knows whom to call and what to do, as described in our note on what to do when SUNAFIL inspects your company.

What the engagement includes, and its limits

The scope is agreed in writing: typically day-to-day advice, document review, the compliance calendar, regulatory updates, periodic reporting and first response to incidents. Larger matters, such as a full employment audit, a restructuring, litigation or a transaction, are scoped separately so that the retainer remains predictable.

We are external counsel. We do not become the company’s employees, take management decisions or sign filings in its name. We advise and prepare; the company decides and acts.

Coordination with the parent company, finance and payroll

A retainer works best when it connects the people who make employment decisions. We report periodically to the regional office in English, with a list of open matters, decisions taken and upcoming obligations. Finance receives advance notice of items that affect cost or provisioning. Where payroll is run by Lynch Payroll, the calendar and the payroll cycle are aligned directly; where another provider runs it, we coordinate with them on the points where legal decisions become payroll entries.

Getting started

We usually begin with a meeting with the regional and local teams to understand the entity and its open issues, followed by a proposal setting out the scope, channels and reporting.