In May's E-Legal: Advice on mineral rights in "Your place or mine?", procurement advice for academies and public sector bodies plus details of our latest events. 

In this month's E-Legal: What's happening on World IP Day, Absence webinar now online & EU data proposals. 

Caroline Redhead, an information law specialist explains the Information Commissioner's analysis of proposals to change data protection legislation. 

In this issue of E-Legal, John Priddle gets whimsical about leap years and quarter days while Aaron Lyons explains the impact of a recent Employment Appeal Tribunal on fixed term workers and redundancy. 

The recent Employment Appeal Tribunal decision in the above case provides clarification on what constitutes “an organised grouping of employees” in relation to a service provision change.

Property solicitor John Priddle explains the origins of quarter days in the property calendar and the challenges of leap years for landlords and tenants. 

The current economic climate has seen many employers looking at redundancy procedures in order to cut costs. It is well-established by case law that, even where the employer can show a real need to reduce staffing numbers due to a downturn in business, a failure to look for alternative employment within the organisation can make a redundancy dismissal unfair. 

The Government plans to increase the qualifying period for employees to bring claims of unfair dismissal moved one step closer with the recent publication of the draft legislation on this issue.  Assuming that legislation does not alter massively in the next few months, employees who commence employment on or after 6 April 2012 will have to wait two years before they can bring claims for unfair dismissal.  Any employee who starts a job before 5 April 2012 will still be able to rely on the one year qualifying period.
 

We have looked at the changing picture with regard to cookies’ compliance in previous updates.  To recap, the rules have completely changed, so that consent is required, in almost all cases, where a cookie is to be set.

The Article 29 Working Party (Europe’s Data Protection “Think Tank”) is due to publish a proposal for a radical new framework for Data Protection in the EU.