When people are the biggest M&A risk in the first 100 days after Closing

The deal may be signed, the champagne poured and the market announcement issued, but the real test of an M&A transaction begins after closing. The first 100 days are when the rationale behind a merger or acquisition is translated into operational reality, as business functions are combined, reporting lines are redrawn and overlapping roles are reviewed. Employment risk tends to surface not because companies are unaware of the law, but because of the order in which decisions are made.

In most integrations, the new structure is decided first, an announcement follows, and the legal assessment is squeezed in afterwards, often as a formality to justify what has already been decided. Consultation happens after a decision is effectively final. Severance is calculated once headcount reductions are already communicated. By the time employment counsel is involved, the room to adjust course has tightened considerably, and what should have been a manageable process becomes a source of dispute.

The fix is not a longer checklist. It is a single control point placed earlier in the sequence: no employment-affecting integration step should be executed or communicated until it has cleared four checks.

1. The employment classification of the change must be confirmed, since a reporting line change, a role merger, or a redundancy carry different legal consequences and different procedures.
2.  Any required consent, consultation, or notification must be completed, not scheduled around an announcement that has already been made.
3. Terms offered must be checked against comparable employees elsewhere in the integration, since unexplained inconsistency is what most often turns individual concerns into collective disputes.
4. The rationale, process, and terms must be documented at the time the decision is made, not reconstructed later if a claim arises.

Placed before implementation rather than around it, this gate does not slow integration down – it prevents a far costlier cycle of announcing changes, absorbing disputes, and revisiting decisions that were never properly cleared to begin with. Companies that protect the value of a transaction in the first 100 days are not always the ones with the most detailed integration plan, but the ones that will not let an employment decision move forward until it has passed through that single point of control.

This article was first published in the September 2026 edition of GGI FYI Employment Law News No. 21| September 2026 , a publication by Geneva Group International (GGI) featuring insights from professionals across the globe.

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