Most EOR providers can tell you they own an entity in the country where you're hiring. Very few can tell you what happens next. When a payroll rule shifts, when a termination becomes contested, when a works council requires consultation, who picks up the phone? Which firm? Which team? What's the chain?

That silence is the gap in most compliance stories. Here's how the architecture works when it matters.

Layer one does the work

The owned entity is where employment happens. Your hire in Germany, your engineer in Singapore, your sales lead in Brazil — all of them are employed by Teamed's local entity in that country. That entity signs the contract, runs payroll, and holds the employer relationship in the eyes of local law.

This is the foundation. But it is not the structure.

An entity gives you a legal address. It gives you the right to employ. What it doesn't give you, by itself, is the legal intelligence to know when the ground is shifting beneath that employment relationship, or the reach to respond to that shift consistently across dozens of countries at once.

Layer two sets the standard

DLA Piper is Teamed's global legal partner. When a compliance event has cross-border implications, or when a legal question requires a consistent answer across multiple jurisdictions, DLA Piper is the firm that anchors the response.

Think about what that means in practice. If an employment classification question emerges simultaneously in three countries, you don't want three separate local firms giving three separate answers with no one coordinating across them. You want a single tier-one firm holding the thread. DLA Piper does that. It's the layer that gives your compliance architecture coherence when local answers alone aren't enough.

This matters most at the moments you can least afford inconsistency. A board-level audit, a cross-border restructure, a policy change that touches your entire headcount. The global counsel layer exists for exactly those moments.

Layer three knows the room

Some compliance events aren't about cross-border coherence. They're about knowing how a specific labour authority in a specific country actually behaves. How a local court has historically approached a particular kind of dispute. What a regional works council expects in practice, not just in principle.

That knowledge doesn't live in a global law firm. It lives in the specialist local employment firms that Teamed layers on top of its owned entities in specific jurisdictions. These firms don't replace DLA Piper. They do something different. They bring the ground-level fluency that only comes from working inside a single legal culture every day.

When your hire in a given country faces a situation that requires that kind of local depth, the local specialist is already part of the architecture. You don't need to find one. You don't need to vet one. The relationship exists.

How the layers move together

A compliance event rarely announces which layer it needs. That's why the architecture matters more than any individual layer.

Here's what the flow looks like. A change in local employment conditions is identified — either by the owned entity's in-country team or flagged by the local specialist firm. If the change has implications across other jurisdictions, or requires a consistent group-level response, DLA Piper coordinates the analysis. The owned entity implements the outcome. If the local situation requires specialist depth, the local firm leads that thread while DLA Piper maintains cross-border consistency.

No single layer is doing all three jobs. Each one is doing the job it's actually built to do.

The question to ask your current provider

Can they describe this chain to you? Not in general terms. Specifically. When a compliance event occurs in the country where you're hiring, who handles it? Is there a global counsel relationship, or just the entity? Is there a local specialist, or is the entity expected to carry everything?

Most providers present entity ownership as the whole compliance story. Owning an entity is the starting point. The question is what you've built on top of it.

Teamed owns 57 entities across 57 countries. A single layer is a foundation. Three layers are a structure.