A major problem in practice in the field of employment law is the requirement for a highly formalised procedure for the delivery of documents between employer and employee. In most cases, important documents must be delivered to the employee in hard-copy form at the workplace. The question of whether this procedure for delivering documents must also be applied in the case of concluding contracts between employer and employee was recently addressed by the Supreme Court of the Czech Republic. In an interesting judgment, file no. 21 Cdo 2061/2021, the court specifically addressed the legal question of whether an agreement between an employee and an employer who are acting at a distance can be validly concluded even if the statutory requirements for the delivery of documents were not observed in the delivery of documents containing an offer of agreement and its acceptance.

In the case under consideration, the Supreme Court of the Czech Republic dealt with a situation where an employer gave its employee notice of termination of employment for organisational reasons, but the employee did not consent to the dismissal. The parties eventually agreed informally through email communication that they would enter into a settlement agreement with an agreed amount of severance pay. On this basis, the employer sent the employee, as an attachment to an email message, a scan of a settlement agreement that had been signed by the chairman of the board of directors of the employer. The employee’s legal representative subsequently sent an email message confirming that the agreement had been accepted and signed by the employee, and then sent the signed agreement back to the employer by electronic mail.

However, the employer did not pay even after being requested to pay the severance pay agreed in the settlement agreement. The employee was thus forced to turn to the court with an action. The employer defended itself primarily by arguing that since the statutory requirements under Section 335 of the Labour Code for the delivery of documents between employer and employee via a network or electronic communications service (by email) had not been observed, no valid conclusion of a settlement agreement had occurred.

In the case under consideration, the Supreme Court of the Czech Republic stated, first and foremost, that with the adoption of the new Labour Code (Act No. 262/2006 Coll., Labour Code) and especially its amendments responding to the adoption of the new Civil Code in 2012 (Act No. 89/2012 Coll., Civil Code, as amended), the result was that civil law regulation applies subsidiarily to labour law. At the same time, the court emphasised that the Labour Code lacks comprehensive regulation of legal acts and does not regulate the procedure for concluding employment contracts or other agreements. In view of these facts, in the court’s opinion, the general provisions of the Civil Code must be applied to the conclusion of employment contracts or other agreements in the field of employment relationships. For this reason, even the regulation of the delivery of documents in employment relationships does not have a fundamental impact on the assessment of the formation of a bilateral legal act.

It is therefore possible to summarise that the Supreme Court of the Czech Republic has thus for the first time expressly admitted that employment contracts or other employment law agreements can also be concluded at a distance, on the assumption that the general requirements arising from the Civil Code are met. The decision in question may thus represent another significant step in the field of electronisation of legal acts in employment relationships. In this connection, we point out that this decision does not in any way relate to unilateral legal acts in this field (e.g. notice of termination of employment, wage assessment, etc.), for which the requirements for a formalised delivery procedure will continue to apply in full.

Anna Jakůbková and David Svoboda

This text was originally prepared by the law firm Mašek, Kočí, Aujezdský in cooperation with the Association for Electronic Commerce (APEK) as legal bulletin No. 09/2022 intended for members of this association.

This text was translated from Czech to English using an AI translator.