Client Stories

The rise of remote work raises a dizzying array of questions for startup founders and workers. Consider an early-stage company in the U.S. that wants to hire in Italy – but has no offices in Europe. How can it comply with employments laws and regulations there?

Those kinds of questions arise often at Deel, a company founded in 2018 that offers a HR platform to help companies hire, pay and manage workers worldwide. Deel’s Elisabeth Diana moderated a conversation about the changing global employment landscape with Laura Becking, head of Orrick’s Global Employment and Equity Compensation practice, and Samuel Dahan, chief of policy and chair of Deel Lab for Global Employment, an employment research and policy consortium.

Excerpts from the conversation:

Elisabeth Diana: What is the Deel Lab for Global Employment?

Samuel Dahan: The Deel Lab is a consortium of academics and industrial partners interested in global work. The aim is to understand what policy hurdles employers and employees are facing.

Elisabeth Diana: What has changed about global work over the past few years?

Laura Becking: There was a time, particularly for growth companies, that they would not start as global companies. They would just be a local company. I think almost every growth company starts as a global company now. They have at least one person that is outside their place of primary operation.

What we look at in my practice are all the issues around having people outside of the U.S., mostly: “I want to go into a country. I’ve got amazing talent that I’ve located in this country, but I don’t operate there. I don’t have a subsidiary there. How do I engage that talent?’ Or, for very large public companies that are already public: ‘I’m acquiring a company that has all these operations in the country or countries that I don’t operate in. How do I manage that environment?’

Elisabeth Diana: Samuel, do you want to talk about Deel in general? How did Deel Lab come about?

Samuel Dahan: Deel provides simplified solutions for employers that want to expand internationally without having to set up their own structure. It’s a streamlined tool for employers to outsource HR tasks while remaining compliant with local employment law.

We’ve been talking about building new AI- and analytic-based compliance tools to help clients and workers understand regulations better. Deel operates in a lot of countries, and employment law is very different from one place to another. German employment law and French employment law are very different even though they’re neighbors.

So the idea was: Why don’t we build an AI system that answers basic legal questions that can help employers be compliant? Then we realized there’s a bigger question out there. There are two main problems global employers are facing. The first is a lack of clarity in regulation. Another problem is that sometimes there are no laws.

There is a lot of room for practitioners, academics, industry partners and policymakers to think about the problems and ask how we can come up with policies that will be better match the new economic reality.

Elisabeth Diana: Laura, how are you and Orrick going to be involved in Deel Lab?

Laura Becking: One of the things we do a lot with our clients is think about the regulatory environment and legal climate, but we also do a lot of looking around the corner. We have over 4,000 companies in our tech practice. So we see a lot. We have a sense of what market practice is at different phases of a company’s life.

When Samuel and I spoke for the first time … there was so much overlap on what we were thinking. I’m thinking about it from the perspective of, ‘There’s a company trying to solve a problem immediately,’ so I don’t get to take quite as long a view. Seeing Samuel’s views and understanding how he’s thinking about these things from a little bit bigger, a little more step-back perspective, was just extremely refreshing and exciting.

Elisabeth Diana: What are the first few hurdles to overcome or goals to meet with Deel Lab?

Samuel Dahan: I’m thinking about a practical book and a set of guidelines on global work.

We developed an employment law predictive tool that helps determine whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor. The first thing we want to do is deploy that tool for Deel Lab and for Deel in Canada and the U.S. and as a next step we want to deploy this tool in 15 jurisdictions.

Once we gather data on the trends we might be able to come up with better ideas on what is wrong with the policies. The idea is to push forward neutral or impartial policy recommendations.

Elisabeth Diana: The past few years have brought on a lot of change in the way we work. What are the things you would like to see changed or what areas are you watching?

Laura Becking: I think (we will see) tools that are easier to access, use and understand, particularly for younger companies. The other area that I find very interesting – and I don’t have as much of a prediction as a hope – is that this also produces some thinking outside the current structures for workers. We have fairly old ideas, established mostly over a hundred years ago around what an employee is, what a worker is – and our world has just changed so much.