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Global employment transfer crucial to success of HP Inc. deal

Annual Review 2017-2018

June 2018

A global employment team, spanning 45 jurisdictions and 25 CMS offices, was created to handle the complex labour law issues created by HP Inc.’s acquisition of Samsung’s printer business.

The transfer of employees from one organisation to the other was one of the most business-critical aspects of the entire transaction.

Following numerous discussions with HP Inc., based in California and Colorado, CMS created and settled on a playbook. This acted as a guide to the review process for all CMS offices, including the terms HP Inc. was looking for in each type of contract.

Zeke Rodriguez, Legal Counsel Global Legal Affairs, HP Inc., said, “We are hugely grateful to the CMS team for their excellent support on this complex and unique project. We were able to take advantage of their global organisation: CMS was able to review contracts in every language we requested, often within very short time frames. Overall, we are very satisfied with CMS’s project management and delivery of the project.”

As CMS acted as the project managers spanning all jurisdictions, HP Inc. dealt with a central core team for the project duration, negating the need for time-consuming and costly calls coordinated across multiple time zones. CMS’s knowledge of the wider project also helped the various HP business teams make decisions on the high-value contracts transferring from Samsung.

CMS London partner Anthony Fincham, who coordinated the global employment team on the transaction, said, “We put together a team in each jurisdiction and gave a detailed briefing on the transaction. Specific questions were raised about the differing mechanisms for the transfer of employees in each particular country. I regularly reported back to HP Inc.’s in-house team as their central point of contact, giving a detailed assessment of progress in each jurisdiction.”

CMS Cologne partner Christopher Jordan added, “In Germany, employee representatives had to be involved in the transaction and consultations with the works council on the ‘split-off’ had to be conducted before the integration of the printer business could take place.”

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