What&#39;s the definition of self employment especially with respect to right to work? Many legal contexts regard self employment equivalently as employment just as much as working for someone else, like job seekers allowance now Universal Credit. Appropriate adjustments are made to the process to correspond to each scenario, but with the aim of having the equivalent effect and access to support etc. Standard visitors leave doesn't allow recourse to public funds, and sometimes exempts the visitor from liability for VAT on consumptions but it does allow one to conduct business while visiting. What is the distinction, if any at all, between the respective activities of self employment, and of conducting business? Somewhat superficially, I suppose that conducting business may be negotiating and signing contracts, to sell things, buy things, produce things, etc. While self employment may more along the lines of working full time oneself directly rendering services to clients/customers like a massage therapist who either owns their own practice room or perhaps travels to people's homes. But the difference ultimately seems to be to be quite superficial and not at all fundamental to the nature of those activities and seems to me predominantly a question of how the activities are intentionally structured, described and framed as the line is much fuzzier then it may at first let on. For example, what if one spends their days performing work in the interest of some hoped-for eventual payoff but which isn't remunerated by the outside world on an hourly basis per se. Suppose someone is an author working daily on a book which work nobody may predict the hourly value of, but which the person does as they believe strongly in their own vision of the finished product and its prospects for success, and so they self-fund these activities whether composing the manuscript itself or corresponding with publishers to sell them on it, both of which may just as conceivably be delegated to someone else like a secretary or ghost writer who would be then doing the exact same things for a separate employer rather than themselves. Yet at the same time proposing disgusting and negotiating contracts with prospective publishing companies seems more akin to conducting business rather than self employment. Why can't the government just call anything at all &quot;employing oneself to conduct business on one's own behalf&quot;? At that point, even calling up O2 customer service to negotiate one's phone bill could be called conducting one's own personal business. And why shouldn't it be? Nonetheless, are the latter category of activities (self employment) permitted on a visitor's leave even while the right to work employer checking provisions would in practice never have much occasion to matter?
What is the distinction between self employment, and conducting business? It's whether or not the visitor earns an income in the UK. The Overview for the government's &quot;Visit the UK as a Standard Visitor&quot; guidance states: You cannot: do paid or unpaid work for a UK company or as a self-employed person And the Appendix to the Immigration Rules confirms exactly what can be done: General Business Activities PA 4. A Visitor may: (a) attend meetings, conferences, seminars, interviews; and (b) give a one-off or short series of talks and speeches provided these are not organised as commercial events and will not make a profit for the organiser; and (c) negotiate and sign deals and contracts; and (d) attend trade fairs, for promotional work only, provided the Visitor is not directly selling; and (e) carry out site visits and inspections; and (f) gather information for their employment overseas; and (g) be briefed on the requirements of a UK based customer, provided any work for the customer is done outside of the UK. Note that these all relate to generating, for want of a better phrase, a non-UK income unlike self-employment.
Such clauses are called "copyright assignment", "invention assignment", and/or "works for hire" clauses, partly depending on the clause's intent and wording. They're pretty common in employment contracts for software development and some creative positions. Frankly, the clauses don't actually do much, at least in the US -- copyright law already recognizes the concept of works made for hire (which belong to the employer), and claims too far beyond that are often rejected if they aren't obviously related to company business. With that said, your hypothetical programmer's painting is safe unless it depicts, say, the contents of an email from the CEO. :) Even if the clause technically entitles the employer to claim ownership, the employer has no legitimate interest in doing so. Likewise, that app created outside work is safe as long as it is created using no company resources and is unrelated to the employer's business. If the app is obviously related, that's where things get hairy.
This practice is probably not illegal, but I think it is at best ethically dubious. The invoice specifies &quot;&quot;Advising in relation to employment agreement with X&quot;, but according to the question no advice about X was given or even asked for, and while advice about Y was discussed, no such advice was given. That suggests that the asker owes the solicitor nothing. However the asker was informed of the hourly charge and then continued to discuss the issue. it could be argued that the constitutes an implicit contract to pay that rate for those discussions. It seems that the asker never said &quot;does that rate apply to this telephone call&quot;, nor did the solicitor say &quot;that hourly clock starts now if you want to continue&quot;. This leaves the situation less clear than it could have been. The second email, as described, seems to imply that the work of giving advice had not yet commenced, and thus no fee was due for services to date. A person in this situation could reply with a letter (sent by email or postal mail or better both) saying that no advice was given, no useful service was performed, and there was no agreement to pay for any service, so no fee is due. If the solicitor takes this to a court case, the asker may well want to consider consulting a different legal professional. This is a case where the exact facts may well matter, so no more precise answer can, I think, be given here.
You don’t need a company to run a business As an individual (sole-trader) you can operate a business, hire employees and contractors and do everything else a business does. The purpose of a company is to separate and protect your personal assets from your business assets. As a sole-trader you are personally responsible for all the liabilities of the business - if it goes bust, you go bust. If the business is operated by a company, then, providing you and the company follow the law, your personal assets are not at risk if the company becomes insolvent.
Now I'm having another conversation with a lawyer and I'm not particularly happy (not to say outraged) that to answer a simple question they require £95 + VAT for 30 minutes Skype session. Maybe it is a common practice in law industry - in my industry (web development) we share our knowledge in an open-source manner. The rate you were charged is actually reasonable for such a limited engagement. Few lawyers are willing to even consider providing any advice on such a limited basis. Most would try to limit their clients to cases generating thousands of pounds in an in person visit. Lawyers are in the business of selling knowledge and time, not documents and results. An open-source approach would undermine their business model just as much as it would for the movie industry or the recording industry. While I appreciate professional legal advice (I know it is required) I have a belief that by obtaining some knowledge first I'll be in a position to ask better questions. This belief is not necessarily very well founded in this context. The reality of information about the law is that the raw data has limited usefulness. One of the main things that a legal education provides is an ability to "issue spot" so that you know what points need to be researched and where to look for them. Without the overall context that a legal education provides, knowing what issues you should be looking for is difficult or impossible, and this is particular true in Anglo-American common law systems, where the law is embedded in an opaque network of appellate cases rather than laid out more or less completely in a carefully organized statute. Also, you are almost completely unqualified to distinguish between a simple question and a hard one. Just as it is difficult for a non-expert to know what is difficult or impossible for a computer to do (e.g. turning raw image input in the models of reality is very hard for computers but easy for people, while intense calculations are simple for computers but hard for people), it is often very difficult for a non-lawyer to know what is an easy or hard legal question. For example, the rights of neighboring home owners when trees start to grow across property lines seem like simple questions but are actually extremely complex legally, as is another simple question such as explaining what a book means in IP terms as a book migrates to a new platform. But, some seemingly complex points (e.g. detailed questions of tax law or civil procedure) can have very simple and clear answers. Finally, keep in mind that in a situation like spousal alimony, if you've done as much research as you state, it is very likely that a definitive answer that you are looking for simply does not exist. There a lots of legal questions that do not have clear objective answers. This is because trial judges in family law matters have wide discretion in a lot of the fine points of alimony decisions, much of it exercised at the trial court level that does not generate binding legal precedents and is not widely available to researchers. Therefore, there is really no substitute in evaluating how judges will exercise that discretion for the collective experience of an attorney who has been through the process many, many times before the particular group of judges who are likely to handle your individual case. In sum, while I understand your frustration, a lot of it is rooted in common, but inaccurate assumptions about how the legal system works.
Does "in the course of providing services" mean "during the same time as providing services" or "for the purpose of providing services" or something else? I ask because I am a programmer who will be working on my own project during the same period as I am providing services to this Client, but after-hours and not for the same purpose or business. I want to make sure that what I create for myself I will own. The best definitions that come to mind off the cuff are "related to" and "in connection with", and both of those phrases appear in the same sentence, so that is quite close to the mark. Black's Law Dictionary (5th edition 1979) (from my hard copy edition) defines "in the course of employment" as follows (citation omitted): The phase "in the course of" employment, as used in worker's compensation acts, related to time, place and circumstances under which accident occurred, and means injury happened while worker was at work in his or her employer's service. Dictionary.com defines "in the course of" as: during the course of. In the process or progress of The best definition I gleaned from relevant case law is as follows: [A]n invention made or conceived in performing, or as a result of performing, the work required by a contract is made or conceived "in the course of" that contract. That would be true even though the invention was not specifically sought in the terms of the contract. An invention is made or conceived "under" a contract when it is made or conceived during the life of the contract and the invention is, in whole or in part, specifically provided for by that contract. Fitch v. Atomic Energy Commn., 491 F.2d 1392, 1395 (Cust. &amp; Pat. App. 1974). The law which forms the background against which the contract term in question is drafted is discussed in the following language from a Federal Circuit patent law case: The general rule is that an individual owns the patent rights to the subject matter of which he is an inventor, even though he conceived it or reduced it to practice in the course of his employment. There are two exceptions to this rule: first, an employer owns an employee's invention if the employee is a party to an express contract to that effect; second, where an employee is hired to invent something or solve a particular problem, the property of the invention related to this effort may belong to the employer. Both exceptions are firmly grounded in the principles of contract law that allow parties to freely structure their transactions and obtain the benefit of any bargains reached. Banks v. Unisys Corp., 228 F.3d 1357, 1359 (Fed. Cir. 2000). A similar contact is applied in the case Greene v. Ablon, 794 F.3d 133, 142 (1st Cir. 2015), but the term was not defined or disputed in that case. This case is still useful, however, for purposes of seeing the kind of issues that are typically raised in a case like this one and to assure yourself that the contract probably is enforceable. For the purposes of this question, the difference between an employee and an independent contractor is immaterial.
What follows is a broad overview. I'm not an expert in this; I just have a bit of experience in this due to a tax situation my wife &amp; I experienced a few years ago. Please do not rely on this advice except as a starting point for more Googling. Your obligations (and your assistant's) will depend on whether the assistant is an employee or an independent contractor. In general, an independent contractor is someone you hire to "get a job done"; you have minimal control over the manner, time, place, tools, etc., that the assistant uses. An employee, on the other hand, is someone you hire to come to work at a particular time and do the job a particular way. (I'm glossing over some details here; see the IRS link above for more details.) If your assistant is an independent contractor, and you pay them over a certain threshold ($600 for 2020), you must provide them with Form 1099-MISC, and file a copy with the IRS as well. Your assistant will then be liable for income taxes on this amount, as well as self-employment tax (see below.) If your assistant is actually an employee, and you pay them over a certain threshold ($600 for 2020), you are required to provide them with a W-2 form, as well as filing a copy with the IRS. In addition, if you pay them more than a higher threshold ($2200 in a tax year or $1000 in any quarter for 2020), you are responsible for withholding taxes from their paychecks, as well as paying the employer's portion of Social Security, Medicare, and/or federal unemployment taxes. How to figure these taxes is complex, but generally the employee must provide you with a completed W-4, and then you must provide them (and the IRS) with a W-2 at the end of the tax year. See Publication 15: Employer's Tax Guide for all the gory details. The self-employment tax is designed to effectively cover the employer's portion of these taxes for self-employed workers. As you might imagine, employers are often tempted to misclassify employees as "independent contractors", since this means that this tax liability gets pushed from them onto their workers, as well as just making the employer's life easier. The Feds will not take kindly to such misclassification if it is discovered. Finally, for the state of Connecticut, consult the CT 1009-MISC filing guide (if your assistant is an independent contractor) or the Connecticut employer's tax guide (if they are an employee). The distinction is pretty much the same as at the federal level.
Your premise is a little off, which changes the question somewhat. The actual clause in the 2016 Junior Doctors contract Section 3 (52) states: Where a doctor intends to undertake hours of paid work as a locum, additional to the hours set out in the work schedule, the doctor must initially offer such additional hours of work to the service of the NHS via an NHS staff bank of their choosing. The requirement to offer such service is limited to work commensurate with the grade and competencies of the doctor rather than work at a lower grade than the doctor is currently employed to work at. Additional work, such as; event and expedition medicine, work for medical charities, non-profits, humanitarian and similar organisations, or sports and exercise medicine do not fall under the scope of additional work as a locum. (note that 'locum' has a standard definition of 'a person who stands in temporarily for someone else of the same profession, especially a cleric or doctor' but is not defined in the contract itself - its a well known term that does not require further definition, but it plays an important part in your question) So, a few things from that section: Where a doctor intends to undertake hours of paid work as a locum This immediately sets limits on what the clause means - the intention is to limit locum work, not general work. The requirement to offer such service is limited to work commensurate with the grade and competencies of the doctor rather than work at a lower grade than the doctor is currently employed to work at A FY2 or later junior doctor can go elsewhere to work as a house officer if they cannot find work as a senior house officer, again restricting the clause to similar working conditions and not general work. This is very very similar to any company putting a non-compete in their contract for, say, a software developer - you need the companies permission to go do contract work for another software company for example. To specifically talk to your point about being a gardener, this clause does not cover that because the employee is not acting as a locum in their professional capacity at that point. The intention of this clause is to fill the gaps in the NHS staffing plan caused by 11 years of mismanagement and underfunding - no longer can an in-contract doctor or nurse work their 38 hour rota and then go fill a lucrative shift with a private hospital, they must offer any hours under 48 to the NHS via the employee bank - this means the bank can pay minimal wages to cover shifts it had to pay locums a lot more to cover before 2016.