Practice area
Employment and labour
The full employment lifecycle for corporates, humanitarian organisations and public bodies, under the Somali Labour Code.
How the firm works in this area
The firm advises employers across the lifecycle of the employment relationship: contracts, staff handbooks, restructurings, terminations and the disputes that occasionally follow. For international organisations it harmonises head-office policy with the requirements of the Somali Labour Code, and it has overhauled a 50-page employee handbook for a donor-funded contractor to bring it into full conformity.
Foreign-worker employment carries its own rules, and the firm advises on the permits and approvals that let an international operation staff its Somali presence lawfully. Where a matter touches immigration, tax or a regulatory licence, the employment team works alongside those parts of the practice rather than in isolation.
Confidentiality is structural, not cosmetic. Representative work in this area is described by anonymized descriptor only. The firm never implies a named client without consent.
What the firm handles
A working list of the matters clients instruct the firm on in this area.
Selected matters
A sovereign government
The firm acted as co-counsel to a sovereign government in an international commercial arbitration seated in Europe, with roughly 157 million euros in dispute under a public infrastructure contract. Its contribution centred on Somali constitutional and administrative law: whether the contractual commitments in question were validly entered into given the approvals that state institutions are required to give, and what the consequences are when that process is not followed. The work combined close analysis of the domestic legal framework with the practical demands of an international arbitral proceeding.
A global technology company
Instructed on the licensing and regulatory framework for landing major international connectivity infrastructure, the firm advised on submarine cable landing licences, the treatment of carrier-neutral data centres, infrastructure-sharing arrangements and the law-enforcement assistance obligations that attach to the cable. Because the landing engaged both the Federal Government and a second Somali jurisdiction, each question had to be resolved twice and reconciled. The advice was structured so that it would hold as the subsidiary regulation under the National Communications Act 2017 continues to develop.
A global satellite communications operator
The firm provided market-entry and regulatory-compliance analysis for a low-earth-orbit satellite broadband service, addressing how the service is licensed under the National Communications Act 2017, how its spectrum co-exists with terrestrial networks, and whether national roaming obligations apply. Where the statutory framework did not map cleanly onto a satellite deployment, the firm identified the gap and proposed a position the regulator could accept, so that the operator could launch on a defensible reading of the licensing regime rather than a contested one.
Related reading
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Instruct the firm on a matter in Somalia
The firm acts directly for clients and as Somali counsel to more than 140 international and regional firms. Tell us about the matter and the right lawyer will respond.