Fatim Jumabhoy

Practice Areas

Fatim is the Asia Head of the Employment, Pensions & Incentives team, Asia, and helps clients achieve practical and commercial solutions to labour and employment issues across multiple jurisdictions. She covers the region, with lawyers in her team on the ground across our office locations, and strong relationships with local counsel in other jurisdictions. Her focus is on cross border and multi jurisdiction matters, working with clients to create regionally consistent yet locally compliant approaches to difficult and complex employment issues. She is sought after for her clear, commercial and common sense based approach to problem solving.

Fatim acts as a trusted, single point of contact for clients with operations across Asia. Although her clients represent a wide variety of industries, many come from the technology, energy, banking and consumer sectors. The unique 'one-stop-shop' approach means that clients can expect consistent and practical solutions wherever they operate in Asia. Fatim advises on all aspects of the employment life cycle: from pre-employment checks & onboarding, document compliance (contracts, work rules, policies), statutory entitlements, executive compensation, employee performance and misconduct management, discrimination, investigations & whistleblowing, supply chain audits, trade union negotiations, crisis response assistance, workplace health & safety, redundancies & restructures, post acquisition integration, termination of employment and post employment restraints.

Her strength is the more complex and challenging areas of employment law, and she is often called upon to advise Boards and C-Suites as they grapple with new initiatives and ways of working. A large part of Fatim's practice is managing sensitive misconduct investigations, including sexual / power harassment and related mental health claims, particularly where the matter has attracted public attention or involves very senior employees. Many of these investigations have cross border or regulatory components. She has also worked with major banks and financial institutions to prepare for, and respond to, changes introduced by the various accountability regimes, as well as handling serious the subsequent disciplinary outcomes. Fatim provides workplace culture and conduct training to senior management teams, as well as helping clients satisfy their statutory training and prevention requirements in a number of jurisdictions, including South Korea, India, Malaysia and the Philippines.

Fatim has also helped clients with contingency planning and crisis management, including strikes and lock outs, damage to people and property, health & safety breaches, environmental disasters and abuse of labour in the supply chain. She has dealt with a number of fatality in the workplace claims across the region, including in Cambodia, Indonesia, Singapore and South Korea. In these fast moving scenarios, Fatim provides astute, practical and speedy advice covering regulators, correction orders and safety prosecutions, civil claims made by the family and criminal action taken against the company and its directors. As health and safety regimes tighten up across the region, and more consideration is given to directors' liabilities for health and safety, this is a growing area of Fatim's practice.

In addition to publishing a monthly e-bulletin keeping clients abreast of developments across Asia, Fatim also contributes to the firm's thought leadership campaigns and most recently has been helping clients navigate changes to the Future of Work, thinking about AI, automation, employee activism and the impact of remote working.

Fatim is a sought after speaker, and regularly holds seminars/webinars on topical employment issues, as well as hosting a closed group employment counsel club. The Asia Pacific Employment Law Guide, a popular and coveted resource for clients, is the flagship product of the Asia EPI team and covers the key employment laws of 22 jurisdictions across the region.

Career

Fatim joined Herbert Smith Freehills in 2013. She was called to the Bar in the United Kingdom in 2003, and admitted as an advocate and solicitor in Singapore in 2014. She was appointed as the Singapore managing partner in 2021, expanding the firm’s leadership team in Southeast Asia.

Awards