Laura Garcia Bodas

Laura provides ongoing advice and strategic counseling on all matters related to managing employment relationships, such as employment recruitment, relations with senior management, compensation and remuneration policies (with particular emphasis on long-term incentives and tenure solutions), equality measures, compliance investigations and resolution of employment breaches, harassment disputes, international mobility, and modification and adjustment of working conditions and dismissals.

Laura's career has a strong transactional focus. She has considerable experience in managing and negotiating collective processes such as transfers, reorganizations, restructuring, and massive negotiations of working conditions and dismissals. Consequently, Laura has generated a large network of contacts among trade unions, labor inspectors and public authorities involved in these types of processes in Spain.

Laura regularly defends her clients in court, this being another area of expertise on her part, which has led her to become a professor of labor litigation law at the Centro de Estudios Garrigues (European University of Madrid).

Although Laura works in labor advice and transactions in all sectors of activity, she is an expert in the healthcare and life sciences market, having recently participated in spin-offs and acquisitions of major international pharmaceutical businesses (from an employment point of view), and having a significant number of companies in the sector as recurring clients.

• Involved in the spin-off of a multinational pharmaceutical company and the subsequent incorporation and start-up of the spun-off local company from an employment point of view. This transaction involved managing a workforce of almost 1,000 employees and global collective bargaining conditions.

• Assisted a pharmaceutical company in the reorganization of its sales force in its operations in Spain, including a reduction of 25% of the workforce, and a cloud technology company in a collective redundancy affecting over 15% of the workforce.

• Defended three multinational companies based in Spain in three different lawsuits for relevant labor harassment, as well as the other managing employees involved in the alleged harassment situation.

• Drafted and negotiated a collective bargaining agreement for a financial institutions group of companies in Spain.

• Advised on the acquisition of a Spanish energy multinational company. Prior to the integration, a reorganization was carried out to mitigate the effects of possible duplication and to adapt the local business to global efficiency ratios (affecting more than 200 employees).

• Negotiated the equality plan of an American multinational company in Spain with more than 400 employees, which involved managing and participating in the negotiation of three different trade unions.

• Defended a company specializing in the payments sector in a class action brought by the works council for the alleged incorrect application of the collective bargaining agreement.

• Advised a multinational company specializing in the world of sports and cultural representation on the reorganization of the company in Spain and the appointment of its entire new management team (including negotiating and writing the working conditions and post-contractual covenants for the general manager and their entire team, restructuring its freelance workforce, modifying the working conditions of its local workforce and transferring some managers from the UK to Spain).

• Advised more than 10 companies in the pharmaceutical sector on the application of a salary guarantee clause of the collective bargaining agreement for the chemical industry, which has generated numerous conflicts with the unions and a "sector" class action before the national court.

• Advised and directly participated in several investigations of harassment and potential labor breaches, the most relevant of which was in the biotech pharmaceutical sector on irregular practices and noncompliance with compliance policies, which resulted in the dismissal for disciplinary reasons of two employees in managerial positions.

• Advised on and negotiated a massive relocation of employees to a different work center of an engineering company focused on the energy sector.

• Madrid Bar Association - Member

• London (2018)

• Inclusion, Diversity & Equity Committee of Baker McKenzie Madrid - Member