Your Settlement Agreement Template May Be Out of Date - Here's Why

Following recent developments in the law, the settlement agreement template used by your business is likely to be in need of an overhaul.

??Does your organisation use a precedent settlement agreement?

??If so, have you recently had that precedent reviewed to ensure it is up to date with current law and best practice?

Significant changes affecting settlement agreements have occurred over the last two years, meaning that historic templates may not be providing businesses with the protection they require. The key changes affect:

1. the waiver of potential future claims; and
2. certain clauses relating to data subject access requests (DSARs).

Going forward, any waiver which seeks to exclude future claims must:

• contain a general description or reference to the statute giving rise to the relevant claim(s); AND
• be drafted in absolutely plain and unequivocal terms.

Ensuring that your settlement agreement precedent complies with these strict requirements will take careful and cognisant drafting.

For DSARs, settlement agreements now cannot be used to restrict the rights of departing employees to submit these requests. Some measures are still permitted, but many templates that include clauses relating to DSARs will predate this change, and will not have been drafted with sufficient care on this point.

The above aside, there have been numerous other changes to settlement agreement best practice over recent years that businesses might wish to reflect in their templates going forward.

Next steps

We recommend that all businesses undertake an urgent review of any settlement agreement templates they use, to be satisfied that they are up to date, compliant, and meet their practical needs.

We would be happy to help you with this. Our comprehensive settlement agreements cover all the required clauses to best protect your business. We can provide you with an entirely new template if wished, or we can review and work with your existing draft – just get in touch and one of our expert team of solicitors will do the rest.

If you would like help with the above, please do email [email protected] who will be able to put you in touch with one of our team to help.

Further reading

If you would like more detail on the development of the changes covered in this article, we have written a series of articles, available to read by clicking the links below.

Sexual Harassment Prevention

With October just around the corner, it isn’t long until the new duty on employers to take positive steps to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace comes into effect. You can read about the new duty and how we can help here .

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