Speaker 1: What to expect from a wrongful termination lawsuit in plain English. If you're like most people, you probably have not been involved in a lawsuit beyond watching My Cousin Vinny on a Friday night with a bowl of buttery popcorn. That's okay. That's what your lawyer is for, but oftentimes I have clients that have questions once they're engaged in a lawsuit about what happens next. So in this quick video, I just want to go over some of the common steps in a lawsuit to help you understand the journey that you're on right now. Step number one is gathering facts. While we're called lawyers, we really should be called fact-yers, and that word is really awkward, so we won't use that. But the reality is what we really do a lot of at first is gather facts. If you think about a football game, the reality is the facts are really the players. The law is just kind of the inbound lines and the referees, but the truth is it's really your facts that make or break your case. It's not about what I can do with the law. The law is what the law is, but your facts will fit into that law in a particular way. So our number one step between me and you is for us to just start gathering all the facts you can think of, from text messages, old voicemails, Facebook messages, private emails, anything that you can think of, including friends with whom you've talked about your employment situation, their names, their contact information, maybe former coworkers who you know witnessed some of the unlawful treatment that you're complaining about in your employment case. Just think of anything and everything. We will eventually weed out stuff that's not relevant, so your job at first is to come up with everything that may, in any possible sense of the word, end up being relevant. Step number two is identifying legal claims. So this might be where we actually earn the lawyer or the law your name, because we actually take the law and apply it to your facts, kind of like a puzzle. And the truth is we can't all of a sudden make up law, and we certainly can't make up facts. What we do is we take the facts that you've given us and we figure out which legal claims we can bring based on what happened to you at your workplace. Step number three is typically an offer to settle. Lawsuits are expensive. They're often frustrating, and they can even be embarrassing for your employer. So before we go all the way to the courthouse and file an official lawsuit, we'll sometimes write a letter to your employer laying out your case and saying, if you want to avoid an embarrassing lawsuit, you can pay this much money and we won't file a lawsuit. That's often called a severance or a settlement agreement, and the letter itself is typically called a demand letter. These don't always result in avoiding a lawsuit, but it's at least worth a try because lawsuits can take a very long time. Often it can take several months to settle a case after a lawsuit's filed. It can take several years after a lawsuit's filed to settle or to go all the way to trial. So it's worth putting that letter out there to see if there's any chance we can settle this without going to the courthouse. The next step is sometimes a negotiation. Maybe your employer won't pay the exact amount of money that we've offered in our demand letter. They might write back with some additional facts and say, your client doesn't have a very strong case for A, B, C reasons, but in order to make this go away, we'll pay X amount of money. It's often not very much money, particularly in that first letter that they write back, but that's when sometimes a negotiation happens. We then take the new facts that they've introduced in their letter. You and I discuss those facts. You may have an answer or a reason to dispute those facts, and then we go back, maybe with the same number that we initially had put out there, maybe with a little bit less if some of the facts that they brought up were legitimate, and we sometimes go back and forth in a negotiation. If negotiations eventually break down or if we're running up against a statute of limitations, it's time to file a formal complaint. Now this doesn't mean you need to really do anything. Once we decide to file a formal complaint, I will draft up a complaint that encompasses all of your claims and that accurately states the facts as you've given them to me. You of course will have an opportunity to review that complaint, but once you sign off on it, you don't have to worry about anything. At our office, we'll actually file the complaint itself with the court. The court will issue us a case number, and from there, your lawsuit is officially initiated in a court. From that point forward, you're referred to as the plaintiff, and your employer at that point is referred to as the defendant. Those are the terms that the court will use to refer to us throughout the lawsuit. The first thing that typically happens after we file a lawsuit is we start to exchange information. Now, that means documents, and in some cases, people can actually ask you a series of questions called interrogatories, and you have to answer those questions in writing under oath. But don't worry, we'll be with you every step of the way to walk you through those questions and to help you understand how to answer those questions truthfully, but without giving away more information than the question asks. Documents is the biggest information gathering and exchanging that we do at this point. We're actually allowed to draft up dozens of requests called requests for production of documents that we then hand to the other attorney or to your employer, if they have not hired an attorney, and with very few exceptions, they have to give us every document that we ask for. What we'll need from you at this point is for you to rack your brain for any documents that you think exist. For example, if you wrote your employer an email and complained about sexual harassment, just as an example, you don't maybe have the email anymore, but you know you wrote that email, you know that it exists, we can ask specifically for that email. If you know that your boss wrote a glowing review for you that should be somewhere in your file, we can ask for that review. If you know that two of your bosses text messaged each other about you, we can request those text messages. There's really nothing that's off limits with the exception of a few categories, obviously emails they've written to their attorney and other categories like that, but for the most part we can request any documents that you know exist that relate to your claims. We can also request documents that you're not sure whether or not they exist, but if they do exist, we want them, so we can write some of those requests really broadly and say things like, all communication between Supervisor X and Supervisor Y regarding plaintiff. And that's really broad, you don't even know if there are any communications between those two supervisors, but if they did communicate in any way that's in writing, again, text message, voicemail, email, etc., then we can get our hands on those documents. Here's the catch, it goes both ways. So while we're drafting this request for production of documents and serving that on your employer, they can also ask you for any and all documents that you have that relate to your case. Some common ones that they ask for, of course, are all documents that relate to you searching for a new job after your termination. So as you're looking for new jobs, if you're writing a cover letter or filling out an application or emailing with a potential employer, keep those records because you'll want to turn those over to prove that you were indeed looking for a job. But there may be other types of information that you feel like is private, but once you've initiated a lawsuit about it, it's not private anymore. For example, if you emailed back and forth with a coworker who was a really good friend and maybe made some complaints about your boss or said some things about your boss that you felt were very private at the time that you wrote those emails, if that relates to your employment situation or your employment claims, we're going to have to give those emails over to your employer. So just do be aware that while we get to ask them for every document, they also get to ask you for every document. The next step is petitioning the judge. This actually happens all throughout the lawsuit process. It's typically called a motion or a hearing. You don't need to attend these hearings 99% of the time. They're usually the lawyers disagreeing about how the particular law applies to your situation. And so we'll often say, Hey, look, lawyers disagree on how the law applies to this situation. Let's go ask the judge what she thinks. And then we both kind of write up a memo that makes our argument as well as we can. And we present those memos to the judge. And then she looks at them and makes a decision about how the law applies in these particular facts. And again, these are usually things between the lawyers that you don't need to worry about that much. On occasion to prepare for a hearing, we might need you to help us get more information or help us understand a certain situation better, but the legal part of it is up to us. And for the most part, these hearings or motions before the judge are on purely legal issues. The next step is testifying under oath. Now you may be thinking, wait a second. I don't testify under oath until I'm on the witness stand at trial. Not quite. There's a procedure called a deposition and depositions happen in almost all of my employment cases. And that means that we go into a conference room. Typically the other lawyer is there that other lawyers able to ask you questions and you're actually sworn in under oath. Oftentimes there's a video camera there recording that there's always a transcriptionist there and he or she is typing out every single word that we say, including the ums, which trust me can be a little bit embarrassing when you look back on the transcript and realize how often you say um, but it happens. She literally takes down every single word that is said in that room. Now you have to answer the questions that are asked. Occasionally if I'm there with you, I might object to the question, but unlike in the courtroom, even if I object, sometimes you still have to answer the question. And then the other lawyer and I can argue later, often petitioning the judge, whether or not that particular piece of your testimony is allowed to be a part of the trial. So this is a place where they're going to really try to ask you anything and everything. Don't worry. We'll be very prepared going in. We'll have gone through practice sessions, et cetera, but do be aware that in most cases the plaintiff has to sit down and testify under oath in front of the other attorney long before they would ever end up on the witness stand. Now one last thing, your employer is typically not in the room for these depositions. It usually just involves your employer's lawyers, you and your lawyer. In a final effort to avoid a full blown trial, we might go to what's called mediation. Now mediation is not something that typically takes place in the courtroom. It usually takes place in maybe a downtown conference room. What happens is we sit in one conference room and your employer and their lawyers sit in another conference room and then a neutral person called the mediator walks back and forth between our different rooms and tries to help us reach an agreement. Now when the mediator comes into our room, she'll usually say, wow, your employer has a really solid defense. You probably want to lower your initial offer. If they go to trial, their defense is going to sound really good. You might think, oh wow, the mediator's biased, they're not on our side. But then we give them our best information and then they walk over into the other conference room and they say, whew, that plaintiff has a very good story. You are not going to want a jury to hear that plaintiff's story. You guys should increase your offer. That's really how it goes. They go back and forth. Mediations can take several hours. They usually last all day. They can also take several days and there's no guarantee that they'll end with a settlement, but it's usually worth trying to mediate before we actually suit up and go to a full trial. Suiting up for trial is the final step. Now in a typical employment case, it doesn't go all the way to trial. At some point from the initial complaint filing through the beginning of trial, there's often a settlement, but not always. Every once in a while, we're just at an impasse and it's time for us to go before a jury of your peers and tell your story and find out which story the jury finds more credible. Don't worry. If we ever get to this stage, we will be ready, cue Eye of the Tiger. The final step, and this is a bonus, is enjoy a glass of wine or a cocktail or a beer or a pint of ice cream or whatever you enjoy because the reality is making the decision to challenge your termination takes a lot of guts, so I commend you for that. This can be a decision that's scary and incredibly stressful, but I often find clients who maybe never in a million years would have found themselves as a plaintiff in a lawsuit having something incredibly unfair and unlawful happen to them with an employment situation and they really have a desire to seek justice, not only for themselves, but so that their employer learns a lesson and maybe doesn't treat the next employee as poorly as they were treated. I hope this video has helped demystify the process for you a little bit of a lawsuit and helps you make the decision whether it's worth it for you to push back against your termination.