A legal audit of an employment contract under Georgian law consists of four precise tests: the legality of form and term (Article 12), the language rule (Article 13), the completeness of essential terms (Article 14) and the legality of restrictions (Article 60). Above all of them stands the floor of Article 1, paragraph 3: a contract may not establish norms that worsen the employee's position compared with the law. This is not a United States-style contract compliance review — in the Georgian system every audit finding must rest on a specific, numbered article of the Labour Code, and that is exactly what gives the audit its enforceable value.
Test One — Form and Term
Article 12 permits an employment contract orally or in writing, for a fixed or an indefinite term, but where the relationship exceeds 1 month, written form is mandatory (paragraphs 1–2). A fixed-term contract may be concluded only on enumerated grounds — among them a specific volume of work, seasonal work, a temporarily increased workload, the replacement of a temporarily absent employee, remuneration subsidy under the Law on the Promotion of Employment, and another objective circumstance (paragraph 3). For the auditor, the conversion norms are decisive: if the term exceeds 30 months, or if successive contracts together exceed 30 months (the second contract being concluded within 60 days of the expiry of the first), the contract is deemed indefinite (paragraph 4); a fixed-term contract concluded without any statutory ground is likewise deemed indefinite (paragraph 5). The start-up exception — where the employer's state registration took place within the preceding 48 months — is itself constrained: the fixed term may not be less than 3 months, the exception does not apply to an entity created through reorganization, and once the period expires the relationship becomes indefinite (paragraphs 6–8). In addition, the employer must inform fixed-term employees about existing vacancies (paragraph 9).