ED HONES: 3 MOST-COMMON REASONS PEOPLE LOSE EMPLOYMENT LAWSUITS

 The speaker's name is Ed Hones.  He's good and he covers important work-related topics.  

Talk to a lawyer to get advice on your specific situation. 

LYING: #1 REASON WHY PEOPLE LOSE EMPLOYMENT LAWSUITS

Employment lawsuits are very difficult to win.  The burden of proof falls largely on the employee bringing the lawsuit; that means the employee has to prove everything.  The employee will have to disprove whatever the employer uses as a defense.  So, to win your case, your lawyer will need to carefully plan a strategy; to do that, they need to know everything.  EVERYTHING. Every case has good facts and bad facts.  Your lawyer needs to know both--the good, the bad, and the ugly.  

Most complaints are forthright about the good facts.  Bad facts are equally important some either don't tell the lawyer about bad facts or they lie about the bad facts.  Lawyers need to know the bad facts so they can get ahead of it early on, they can structure your complaint with specific communications, documents, and discovery, and oppose certain people and not others.  If your lawyer doesn't know about the bad facts until you're deep into the litigation process, it can be too late to do anything about it and that will tank your case.

HISTORY OF POOR PERFORMANCE:  #2 REASON WHY PEOPLE LOSE EMPLOYMENT LAWSUITS

How do employment lawsuits work for most lawsuits the courts use the burden of shifting analysis.  And that just means that the requirement to prove something switches between the parties.  First, the employee has a requirement to prove that they were discriminated against, retaliated, wrongfully terminated, or whatever.  And then it switches over to the employer, who will have the opportunity to prove some NON-DISCRIMINATORY REASON for doing whatever it did to the employee.  If the employer can successfully prove its non-discriminatory reason, well the employee loses the case.  What that boils down to is if the employer can prove that you were a crummy employee, you lose your case.  So obviously employers will claim this in every case.  They will claim the employee was a terrible worker, always late, always getting into trouble, having rude outbursts, and on and on and on.  If they are lying about it, your lawyer will have no problem disproving their lies.  But if they have evidence to show that you were a crummy employee, that can tank your case.  For example, say John Doe brings a claim of wrongful termination but his employer shows that John received two negative performance reviews over the past year received a disciplinary write-up for getting in a fight with a co-worker, and showed up late to work five times as evidenced by his time cards.  In that case, because the employer has so much evidence showing that he was a bad employee and that they had a legitimate reason to terminate him.

TIMING OF EVENTS: #3 REASON WHY PEOPLE LOSE EMPLOYMENT LAWSUITS

Some claims like retaliation or wrongful termination come down to the timing of events. To understand more about that, watch my videos on retaliation and wrongful termination.  To win cases like retaliation claims, the employee needs to show 2 things: first, that they engaged in a protected activity, and second, that their employer took an adverse action against them because of it.  So the sequence of events is going to be very important in claims like these because the employee has to show that they engaged in this protected activity first and that only after they engaged in that protected activity did the employer decide to take the adverse action against them.  So if the sequence of events works out, these cases are very easy to prove.  But sometimes a sequence of events will undermine the claim altogether because sometimes the employer will have evidence that it was planning the adverse action way before the employee engaged in this protected activity.  For example, Jane Doe feels like her managers are treating her differently because she's a woman.  So she writes a complaint to her company's HR department, and the next week the company fires Jane.  On its surface, this looks like an obvious case of retaliation because Jane engaged in protected activity when she sent that HR complaint and the employer terminated her right after.  But in this case unbeknownst to Jane or her lawyer, the company had been dealing with financial difficulties and had decided to lay off James hold Department a month before Jane made her complaint in that case if the company can prove with evidence of laying off Jane along with the rest of her Department a month before she submitted her complaint to HR then Jane is probably going to lose her lawsuit because the company could not have been motivated by Jane's complain before she made the complaint.

First, do not lie to your lawyer.  They need to know everything--the good, the bad, and the ugly.  

Second is poor performance.  If your employer can prove that you're a crummy employee, that can tank your case.  

Third and final reason is timing.  If your employer can prove that it made its decision to fire you BEFORE you engaged in any protected activity, it'll be hard to prove that the employer was motivated by your protected activity and that can sink your case too.