Our employee benefits and ESOP practice advises on the full range of employee incentive schemes. The firm’s multidisciplinary team advises on how best to structure, establish and operate employee incentive arrangements in compliance with Israeli employment, tax, company and securities laws. Within our service, we help determine the most tax-efficient manner of remunerating and incentivising individuals through the use of employee incentive and share option schemes.

Our expertise includes obtaining the necessary tax rulings for operating an ESOP in Israel and, where necessary, rulings from the Israel Securities Authority. We also act as trustee of many local and foreign ESOPs.

We assist and represent many clients in drafting and updating addendums of employee benefits and incentives plans, negotiating and litigating claims with respect to applicability of plans to employees. This includes employment agreements, termination agreements, severance benefits and employee reassignments on behalf of international corporations closing down their business activities in Israel.

Many of our clients are international corporates (listed on NASDAQ, NYSE, LSE as well as other exchanges) for whom we have extensive experience reviewing, consulting and adapting the rules of their international incentive arrangements and option schemes in order to take into account Israeli tax, employment, and securities laws, as well as other regulatory issues.

We also handle all ESOP-related issues arising from mergers and acquisitions, including due diligence of ESOP schemes, assessing the effect of a merger on employee incentive arrangements, cash-out agreements, conversion of options into options of the acquirer and obtaining the necessary pre-rulings from the tax and securities authorities in order to effect any accelerated vesting, cashing out or issue of new options.