Mr. Sheahan Verghese is the co-founder of TLA [Tree of Life Associates], a boutique law firm in Bangalore, India, with a strong focus and specialized expertise in Labour & Employment law, among other key practice verticals including sports law, technology law, IP, and data protection and privacy law. With over 20 years of experience, Mr. Verghese heads the Employment Law practice at TLA and is the co-practice head of the firm’s data protection and privacy law practice, the sports law practice and the transactional IP and technology law practice, along with Ms. Vidyut Bedekar.

Mr. Verghese is recognized as one of the leading individuals in employment law in India, consistently ranked by Chambers & Partners in their Asia Pacific rankings since 2014, and by Who’sWhoLegal’s Labour & Employment global lawyers guide since 2017.

TLA is among the few law firms in India with a super specialized employment law practice, serving a client base focused on pure-play employment law matters. The firm’s employment law practice provides extensive advice to both cross-border and domestic employers, addressing all stages of the HR and employment lifecycle. TLA’s approach to labor and employment law is pre-emptive, proactive, pragmatic, and often strategic, ensuring alignment between client global HR ethos, policy, and strategic imperatives with Indian employment law and practice.

Key Labour and Employment Law Expertise

Mr. Verghese advises extensively on a wide range of labour and employment matters, key areas include:

• Employment Documentation: Offer letters, appointment letters/employment contracts, NDAs, IP assignment agreements, key management (executive) contracts, and HR policies. Advice on the legal viability of employment and post-employment covenants, including non-competition, non-solicitation, confidentiality, and employment bonds.
• Wages, Benefits, and Compensation: Advising on wage and benefits restructuring, leave encashment, PF, international worker issues, social security and totalization agreements, and structuring employee stock incentives (ESOP, ESPP, RSA, RSU, phantom stock), and employee trust closures.
• Industrial and Employment Relations: Drafting and review of code of conduct, disciplinary policies, advice on workplace harassment (including sexual harassment), anti-discrimination laws (including relating to the LGBTQI community, disabled persons, and transgenders), and workplace conduct. Advice in structuring performance management, lay-offs, termination, and closure.
• Workplace Investigations: Conducting independent and impartial workplace and ER investigations for clients, including fact-finding, witness interviewing, evidence collection and analysis, and solutioning. Investigating a range of workplace complaints, including allegations relating to ethics and code of conduct violations, prevention of sexual and other harassment policy violations, and other policy or service rules violations.
• POSH (Prevention of Sexual Harassment): Advising on all aspects of India’s POSH law, including compliance, putting in place best practices and POSH policies, and conducting training workshops for ICC and employees that are based on case study. Representing both the ICC and employers in appellate and other actions filed by employees against ICC decisions or employer actions. Also representing victims of sexual harassment in appellate and other actions. 
• Termination: Advising clients on employee termination across multiple scenarios, including reductions-in-force (RIF), performance-linked termination, and misconduct. Conducting the RIF process on behalf of the client.
• Transition Management & Cross-border M&A: Advice on employment issues, including transfer of undertaking, employee transfers, and impact on wages, benefits and compensation and HR culture and policy.
• Contingent Workforce Management: Contracts with manpower/staffing vendors, advice on legal issues arising from contingent work force, including regularization and compliance risk, and structuring contingent workforce engagement.
• Employment IP: Advising on employment IP, IP audit and management in an employment environment, trade secrets and data protection in India, and protection of confidential information at the employee and corporate level.
• Workplace Privacy: Advising on the implications of India’s data privacy regulations in the workplace and employee expectation of privacy. Conducting compliance audits to align employer practices with these regulations, specifically in terms of employee monitoring and external data transfers.
• Litigation: Supporting clients in all labour and employment litigation matters. Assisting MNC clients in defending regularization and wage and benefit claims from contingent and regular workforce. Representing clients in labour conciliation matters and labour suits around wrongful termination, as well as litigation relating to sexual harassment matters. Assisting clients in labour office actions, appeals against adverse orders from social security and statutory benefit agencies (Provident Fund, etc.) and other labour statutory authorities.
• Labour Codes: Advising clients on the impact of the proposed labour codes on HR legal systems, including on wages, benefits and compensation, contingent workforce engagement. Providing advice on compensation structure, reviews and restructuring, workforce engagement models and ER and termination practices and systems.

Other practice areas

Mr. Verghese also advises on techno-commercial contracts, including outsourcing, technology transfer, collaboration, reseller and licensing transactions (including software, gaming and SaaS contracts), and software services supply, sourcing, reseller, subscription and other commercial contracts related to the development, licensing and use of software. Mr. Verghese also advises on legal and regulatory issues in new age and emerging technologies such as IOT, AI and cryptocurrency.

He has also advised clients on setting up league-based sports franchise structures.