Labor & Employment Architectural Framework: Global Employment Built Right from the Start

What is a Labor & Employment Architectural Framework (LEAF)?

The companies that get international employment right early have a real advantage: cleaner acquisitions, a shorter path to B Corp certification, preserved optionality as they grow. The ones that don't spend years — and real money — unbuilding structures that should have been built correctly the first time.

Most founders default to trusting an EOR, waiting until something breaks, or having their ops lead figure it out. Those choices create legal exposure that compounds invisibly. They also close doors.

LEAF is the alternative, and it’s a proprietary method that only Woodhead’s Law can deploy. Briefly, it is a structured assessment of your international employment posture, followed by implementation of what's missing, with ongoing counsel as your company grows.

How it Works

Assessment

We start by mapping where you are. Using a proprietary evaluation framework covering your policies, your systems, your supply chain accountability, and your track record, we identify what's working, what's missing, and what's creating exposure you may not see yet.

You receive a written Assessment: a plain-English picture of your current compliance posture and what needs to change.

Build

We implement what the Assessment identified. That means drafting policies, establishing worker feedback and complaint systems, structuring contracts with enforceable labor obligations, and building prevention and remediation processes. Each deliverable is scoped and priced before work begins.

Ongoing

Your employment structure isn't static. As you enter new markets, make new hires, or restructure your workforce, your compliance requirements change. Ongoing counsel keeps your structure current and your exposure managed.

What is Evaluated

The framework covers the full picture of how a company relates to its workers: direct employees, contractors, gig workers, and the people behind your supply chain.

Foundational policies. Do you have adequate commitments on freedom of association, forced labor, child labor, occupational health and safety, living wage, working hours, and worker classification? Adequacy is assessed against international standards, the specific risks in your sector, and the countries where you operate.

Benefits. Health insurance, parental leave, workers' compensation, retirement, What do you offer, and to which workers? Some of these are mandatory, in other cases, they are discretionary. How is your company evaluating what to provide, where, and to whom?

Supply chain accountability. How far into your supply chain do you accept responsibility for the people whose work reaches your product? This applies whether you make physical goods and need to trace materials through a manufacturing supply chain, or you're a technology or services company managing offshore development relationships, content moderators, or platform workers. Every company has workers somewhere in its chain.

Worker voice. Can workers actually raise concerns? The evaluation looks at whether your feedback and complaint channels are accessible, anonymous where needed, available in local languages, and protected against retaliation.

Prevention and remediation. Do you have systems to catch problems before they become liability? When something goes wrong, is there a process for addressing it, or are you handling it case by case?

Who This Is For:

Founder-led companies building their international employer footprint, in any sector.

Consumer goods companies need to understand their supply chains: where materials come from, who makes them, and under what conditions.

Technology and services companies — SaaS, fintech, healthtech — need to understand the workforce behind their product: international employees, contractors, offshore relationships, platform workers.

The framework is the same. What it looks like in practice is calibrated to your company, your sector, and the countries you operate in.

Why Woodhead's Law

The framework at the center of LEAF wasn't built from one vantage point. It was built from more than a decade inside the full system of labor compliance — enforcement, diplomacy, civil society engagement, and technical assistance to governments, companies, and workers across countries and sectors.

At the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of International Labor Affairs, I advised on labor provisions in U.S. free trade agreements and assessed whether foreign governments were meeting their international labor obligations. I also spent those years in direct engagement with companies, unions, NGOs, and advocacy organizations — and over a thousand workers directly — watching the same situations play out from every angle and getting increasingly frustrated at the disconnect between what companies document and what workers actually experience. The LEAF framework is the result of that frustration made useful.

My practice is focused on international employment law, with particular depth in Latin America and a growing global practice. I work exclusively for employers — specifically the ones building something they can stand behind.