Farha Leadbetter
Senior Counsel, Employment & Education, Al Tamimi & Co.
Farha is Senior Counsel, Employment and Education at Al Tamimi & Company based in the Riyadh office in Saudi Arabia and also is a member of the firm’s Education Sector Group. Farha advises local and international clients, across a wide variety of sectors, on employment and education related matters and is currently in house on a long term legal secondment to NEOM KSA.
Farha is a UK qualified lawyer with over 15 years’ experience in private practice and subsequent in house experience specialising in employment law in the UK, UAE and KSA and regularly advises on day to day contentious employment matters including constructive discipline, grievances, probation, performance and absence management, family friendly rights, discrimination & harassment, communications monitoring & privacy, employment status, termination, post-termination restrictions, intellectual property, restructuring and redundancies and labour disputes.
Farha also has solid expertise in drafting employment, secondment, consultancy and severance agreements as well as workplace rules and policies and is experienced in conducting the employment due diligence in corporate transactions.
Prior to joining Al Tamimi & Company, Farha worked as an Employee Relations Compliance Manager for faculty at New York University Abu Dhabi and has an appreciation of the unique demands within the sector and is adept at applying practical solutions. Her role included employee relations crisis and conflict management, workplace conduct investigations and ethics breaches and delivering training programs on positive employee relations and faculty development. Stakeholder management and risk analysis were key components of the role. Specific education related issues included collaboration breakdown mediation, retaliation, falsifying information, misappropriation of funds, scientific misconduct, bullying claims, research data ownership, intellectual property & authorship rights, academic freedom infringement and tenure matters.
Farha’s KSA specific experience involves drafting & reviewing KSA labour law compliant Employment and other legal agreements, workplace policies and advising clients on Foreign Investment & Anti Concealment laws, relevant Ministerial Resolutions, Saudization & Nitiqat requirements, reserved roles, sponsorship transfers, and labour reforms. Farha also has experience drafting Internal Work Rules aligned with Ministry of Human Resources & Social Development (MOHR) requirements and lodging enquiries with Government authorities including MOHR and General Organisation of Social Insurance (GOSI), QIWA & familiarity with employment related Government portals. Matters advised on include remote working, sponsorship liabilities, wage protection, background screening, communications monitoring, privacy, behavioural abuses, harassment, grievances & whistleblowing matters. From an in house perspective, Farha has supported stakeholders on employment compliance in alignment with KSA laws and global standards and been the touchpoint on employment matters in investigations and consequence management. Farha is also experienced in drafting guidance packs containing procedures, step plans and templates letters on disciplinary, performance, sickness and grievance and providing training for management.
In addition to presenting legal seminars and case law updates to clients when in private practice, Farha also has extensive experience delivering labour law and organisational development training to large organisations in the UAE such as MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), ADIA (Abu Dhabi Investment Authority), Mubadala, ADNOC (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company) and ADGM (Abu Dhabi Global Markets) on Change Management, Employee Engagement, Effective Working & Workplace Diversity.
Events Farha Leadbetter has attended as a speaker:
