Speaker 1: Most people already know that if you get wrongfully terminated from your job, the American legal system can award you monetary damages for the harm done to you. This video will answer three related questions. Number one, legally, what is wrongful termination? Two, how do you go about proving it? And three, how much money can you win if you're truly a victim? My name is Branigan Robertson, and I'm an employment lawyer. Let's put first things first. Legally speaking, what exactly is a wrongful termination? To answer that, you first must understand that in the United States, most employees are considered to be at-will employees. This means that an employer can fire an employee for any reason, even an irrational or bad reason, as long as that reason is not unlawful. So what this usually means is a company can fire you, and it's not considered a wrongful termination. However, there are two broad exceptions to this rule, both of which can be considered wrongful termination under most state laws. Number one, an employer cannot fire you for engaging in a protected activity, such as reporting the company as violating a law or making a safety complaint or reporting unlawful harassment to HR or doing something else that is protected by public policy of that state or even federal public policy. Number two, the employer cannot fire you for a discriminatory reason, such as your race, religion, gender, age, or some other characteristic that is protected by state or federal law. So in a very rough nutshell, a wrongful termination occurs when you get fired because you engaged in a protected activity or because you have a protected characteristic. Now I want to emphasize something that a lot of people miss. There must be a nexus between the termination and the employee's protected activity or protected characteristic. This is key. Just because you have a different skin color than your boss doesn't mean you got fired for it. Just because you reported your boss for cutting safety corners doesn't mean you got fired for it. There must be a nexus, a connection between the two, between the protected activity and the termination or the protected characteristic and the termination. Now if you're picking up what I'm putting down here, you're probably wondering or asking yourself, what are all these protected activities that you're talking about? What are all the protected characteristics that trigger wrongful termination? Good question. There are a lot of them and I already made a video where I cover that in much more detail. So if you really want to know, I recommend that you watch my video called Wrongful Termination Law Explained. I'll have a thumbnail up on the screen here and I'll provide a link at the end of this video so you can easily click and watch it if that's what you want to do. If the company fires you unlawfully and you find a good lawyer to take your case, how does the lawyer go about proving that your termination was wrongful? That's a really good question. And we do it kind of in three big steps. The first one is we collect facts, documents, and testimony from our client when we get hired. This is a really time-consuming process that can sometimes last months depending on the complexity of the case and how organized our client is. But once we have everything possible from our client, we file the lawsuit in court or arbitration and then we start the discovery process. The discovery process is about collecting facts, documents, and testimony from the company that you're suing. This involves usually sending subpoenas to the company to get their documents. We demand that they answer written questions under oath. We take depositions, which are verbal questions, to get friendly and unfriendly testimony from witnesses under oath and on camera. And this process usually involves filing motions with the judge to force the company to give us stuff that they refuse to give us in a shady way in violation of the rules of civil procedure. As we start collecting all the relevant facts, we examine those facts to understand what I like to call the sequence of events. As you recall, one way for the company to wrongfully terminate you is to fire you because you engaged in a protected activity. In a scenario like that, it's very important that your lawyer prove that you first made the complaint, submitted the report, or refused to break the law, and then the company retaliated against you. It's the sequence of events. Far too often we get calls from people who tell us, the company fired me because I complained about safety. Only to find out in discovery, months later mind you, that actually the company had written that employee up three times for poor job performance before he ever submitted a complaint about safety. Facts like that make it much more difficult to convince a jury that the employee was terminated because of his protected complaint. At this point in the video, I should say that if you need legal advice, you should pick up the phone and call a lawyer in your state. I'm a California lawyer, and the free consultation process in my office is for California workers who got fired, and they believe that they have a case for wrongful termination, harassment, retaliation, or discrimination. If that applies to you, and you think I've earned your call, please feel free to contact us for a free consultation. I should also say that anything I say in this video should not be construed as legal advice. This video is meant to give you information. If you need legal advice on what to do, call a lawyer in your state. The second thing we do is we look at your job performance and the employer's discipline history. What do I mean by that? Well, it's absolutely critical we establish your baseline job performance. Moreover, we want to know how your employer has treated you and other employees in the past. Specifically, what I mean is we need to be able to prove that you were a satisfactory employee before you engaged in the protected activity. Had you ever been written up before? How long had you worked at the company before your complaint? We need to know this, so if the company lies and says that you were a bad employee, we can show the jury that that claim is not true, and the real reason why you were fired was because you made a protected complaint. Additionally, we want to know how the company has treated other employees. If other employees have complained about the exact same thing that you did, but they didn't get fired, that's going to make your case more difficult to prove to a jury. But if the employer claims that you were fired for being late one day, being tardy, and they haven't fired other employees for being late, then it's more likely that the real reason for your termination is that you made a protected complaint. So how do we go about proving this? First, we look at your personnel file. We look at your performance evaluations, your disciplinary documents. We look at emails, text messages. Second, we get people to testify under oath that you were a good employee, and we get the bad employees to lie under oath. Third, we gather all that information together, and we put together a comprehensive timeline of relevant events so that we can explain your story in chronological order to the jury. Third, the last big thing that we do as lawyers is we look for the liars. In Discovery, we have tools that allow us to get information under oath. That means if you or the company lies when responding to a question, the liar has committed perjury. The jury will know that you are a liar. If you lie to a jury, guess what? You will lose. They don't like liars. So let's say the manager who fired you claims under oath that the only reason why you were fired was because you didn't submit a report on time. You were supposed to submit it on Thursday, but you didn't actually get it in until Friday. But during the Discovery process, we find out and we prove that the company has never fired anyone for submitting a report one day late. Additionally, it turns out we subpoena the manager's emails, and we find he admits to a coworker that he didn't actually fire you for submitting the late report. While it's true that you didn't get the report in on time, if we can show the jury that your manager has lied to them about why you were fired, it will help prove that the real reason for your termination was your protected complaint. Because why would your manager lie about your termination unless he has something to hide, right? In the legal world, we call this pretext. Essentially, a lie is a fake reason for firing someone, where the real reason is a protected activity. And I made an entire video about pretext a couple years ago, and I'll leave a link below if you want to learn more about that. Finally, your lawyers will package together all the sequence of events, your job performance, the company's discipline history, and all the evidence of pretext, and we present that to a jury during trial. The jury is going to decide whether or not your termination was substantially motivated by your protected activity or your protected characteristic. In civil cases like wrongful termination, we have a burden of proof called preponderance of the evidence. We don't use beyond a reasonable doubt. That is for criminal cases. And what this means is under the preponderance standard, you win if you prove to the jury that there's a greater than 50% chance that your wrongful termination claim is true. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a lawyer, in a very rough and quick nutshell, how we prove wrongful termination. If you have any question about that or about what I just talked about, ask me in the comment section down below and I'll try to answer it. I answer a lot of questions that people ask and comment on my videos. Hey, real quick. My goal with this YouTube channel is to help as many people as possible get educated about their employment rights. So if you learned anything at all from this video, please click the like button and subscribe to my channel. That will tell YouTube that this is helpful information and they will push it out, this educational knowledge, to other people who need to hear it. Next, how can you help your lawyer prove your case? Because the lawyer cannot do it without you. Your participation is essential. So what can you do to help win? Well, number one, always be honest. The fastest way to lose your case is to lie under oath. The second fastest way to lose your case is to lie to your own lawyer. Don't just tell your lawyer what you think they want to hear. Tell them all the good facts and the bad facts. Trust me, it'll help. Number two, organize your evidence. If you're able to find a good lawyer, he or she is going to ask you to write down a timeline of relevant events. This is a bullet point document in chronological order which describes all the relevant events as they unfolded. This starts when you got hired, when the bad stuff started happening, and concludes with your termination. Number three, organize your documents. You will not have all the necessary documents at the start of the case, but you certainly have some of them. You need to find every single relevant document, scan it, download it, do whatever you need to do, and send it to your lawyer. Beyond that, you need to make yourself available to your attorney. They need to talk to you before mediation, before depositions. They need to help prep you. We need you to answer questions. Good clients respond quickly to their lawyers. At this point in the video, you might be wondering, If I was wrongfully terminated, how much money is my case worth? The honest answer to that is that it depends. Some cases are worth millions of dollars, and others aren't worth a single penny. It depends on a multitude of factors and circumstances that I've covered extensively in two other videos. If you really want to get an idea of how damages work in lawsuits, I strongly recommend that you watch my video How to Get a Million-Dollar Settlement. I dive deep into damages, the factors that increase or decrease them, and I thoroughly explain punitive damages and settlements. I think this is the best video on settlements and lawsuit value that you can find anywhere on the internet. I also made a video that's more directly relevant to this topic called How Much Money Are Wrongful Termination Cases Worth? This is directly on point and will explain this topic in much more detail. So if you're interested in either of those, wait until the very end of the video and there will be a link. I hope you found this video helpful. If you did, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel. If you're in California and you got fired from your job, you can contact my office for a free consultation if you believe that you have a case for wrongful termination, harassment, discrimination, or retaliation. I'll leave my information on the screen in case you want to contact me. Now if you know somebody who should watch this video, please share it with them. Sharing is caring. That's all I've got for you. I hope you have a fantastic day. Thanks for watching. Take care.