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, companies 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 for many local and foreign ESOPs.

Many of our clients are international corporations (listed on NASDAQ, NYSE, LSE as well as other exchanges) for whom we have extensive experience adapting their international incentive arrangements and option schemes  to the requirements of 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 a merger’s impact on employee incentive arrangements, cash-out agreements, conversion of options in the acquired company into options in the acquiring company and obtaining the necessary pre-rulings from the tax and securities authorities in order to effect any accelerated vesting, cashing out or the issuance of new options.