Legal, Employment at GitLab: A Strategic Partnership

Employment law governs the relationship between employers and employees. At GitLab, the Legal Employment team serves as a strategic partner across the organization, providing expert guidance and proactive legal solutions throughout the entire team member lifecycle. What does this partnership entail?

• We *collaborate strategically with Sales, Go-to-Market, Finance and People teams to develop scalable, compliant employment solutions as GitLab expands globally and responsibly, implementing a comprehensive process for gathering, assessing, and acting on country-specific information.

• We empower the Talent Acquisition department to achieve its critical goals while ensuring compliance with local laws and regulations during sourcing, recruitment, and hiring processes.

• We enable the People Connect team to effectively onboard and support team members with location- and role-specific legal support, setting team members up for success from day one.

• We partner with the Total Rewards team, People Operations team and People Business Partners to develop forward-thinking policies that balance GitLab’s business objectives, team members’ needs, and global legal requirements.

• We provide strategic counsel to our Team Member Relations team, People Business Partners, and Total Rewards as they navigate complex team member matters, including reasonable accommodation requests, performance management, career progression, and other relationship dynamics.

• We champion our Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging initiatives by aligning all employment decisions with our mission statement and applicable laws.

• We safeguard GitLab’s interests while also providing fair treatment during employment transitions, including offboarding processes and post-employment matters.

How to work with the Legal Employment team

Connect - Collaborate - Consult (and Consider any additional guidelines)

To work with the Legal Employment team, reach out early in your process, provide complete information about your needs and any time constraints you have. Being specific about what you’re requesting and any deadlines you face will enable the Legal Employment team to best triage requests and support you.

Connect

To connect with Legal Employment, especially on sensitive matters, you can use the ’legal-employment@gitlab.com’ email address, or for non-sensitive queries, you can reach out in the #legal slack channel. Note that GitLab team members with individual employment queries should reach out to Team Member Relations team on ’teammemberrelations@gitlab.com’ or to their aligned People Business Partner for support.

Collaborate

For cross-functional projects that do not involve individual team members but do require the Legal Employment team’s attention, please (i) open an Issue in the Legal and Compliance Project; (ii) select the appropriate Issue Template; (iii) apply the label legal-employment :: to-do and (iv) if you know which Legal team member you will be working with, include them as an Assignee. This will update the Legal Employment Issue Board for the Employment team’s benefit, and allow the team to pick up and/or assign appropriately.

• legal-employment:in progress means the Legal Employment team is actively working on the issue.
• legal-employment:pending requester means the Legal Employment team has a requirement or task that must be met by the requester before the issue progresses.
• legal-employment:done means the Legal Employment team has finished their portion of the issue.

Consult

A table showing coverage for queries by subject matter is available for internal use and can be accessed here. You are welcome to consult any member of the Legal Employment team.

Consider these additional guidelines

It is worth considering the privilege guidelines when communicating with GitLab’s Legal and Corporate Affairs team (aka the LACA team), including the Legal Employment team. Note that, if a communication is privileged, it can be protected from disclosure in litigation or other disputes. If in doubt, there’s an internal, GitLab University micro course on ‘Privileged communication’, which is relevant to any team member who communicates with the LACA team, seeking legal advice on behalf of GitLab. The training explains the legal protection which may be applied to certain communications between team members and LACA and how best to communicate in order to be protected.

It is also important to note that, if you receive any formal documents that appear to be legal notices, demands, subpoenas, court papers, or other potential litigation materials, you should please forward these by email to the legal team immediately (to the ’legal@gitlab.com’ email address) without responding yourself. Please add a brief note explaining when and how you received the document. These materials often have strict response deadlines, and your prompt sharing allows the legal team to review and address them properly to protect both you and GitLab.