It’s crunch time. Your employer has told you that you’re being fired, or you’ve already been fired.  You’ve been given a choice: either accept a modest severance package and waive all of your legal rights relating to your employment – or reject the package and get nothing.  You’ve been given a deadline to respond.   What do you do now?

You have some more hard choices:

1. Do you go quietly, or are you willing to make a fuss?
2. Should you hire an attorney?

Going quietly vs. making a fuss:

For a lot of people, the biggest single reason not to fight back against an unfair termination is the desire not to engage in a conflict with their soon-to-be-former employer.

This is not necessarily a bad reason. The goal in dealing with a bad situation is to make it better, not to make it worse. If getting into a fight with your former employer will cause you stress – to say nothing of potentially more serious economic consequences, like the possibility of being “black-listed” in your field or industry – you’d be crazy not to take seriously the option of avoiding that scene entirely.   It may be that cutting your losses and moving on is really the best of several bad alternatives.

This is especially true where the alternative to going quietly is engaging in litigation.  The prospect of suing your former employer for lost income, damage to your reputation, and emotional distress (for example) may be superficially appealing.  The reality of litigation, however, is usually more of the same:

• More lost income (from the time you spend dealing with the court and lawyers).
• More damage to your reputation (e.g., when the employer publicly blames everything on your poor judgment, bad people skills, or paranoid delusions).
• More emotional distress (from the time you spend agonizing over and reliving every bad moment you had at your former workplace and worrying about whether you will ever achieve any sort of vindication).   

None of these risks mean that you shouldn’t fight back aggressively at what you perceive to be injustice, if you think it’s the only way to achieve your previously identified goals (see here and here).  But you’d better go into it with open eyes – if you’re going to sue your employer, it’s going to be rough.

On the other hand, being unwilling to sue your former employer doesn’t mean that you have to slink away defeated.  Surprisingly often, a fired employee is able to have an impact on the conditions of their departure by making a counteroffer.

The company may well be willing, in exchange for a waiver of your right to sue, to improve whatever financial offer it had previously been willing to make.  More money, a continuation of health benefits, a good letter of recommendation, an agreement not to contest unemployment benefits – these are all things that you might, through non-aggressive but firm negotiations, be able to obtain, even without declaring open warfare against your former employer.

Should you hire an attorney?

Confused? Uncertain? Don’t know whether you should fight or flee? You’ve got one more option: call a lawyer for advice. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, I recommend it. 

True, it’ll probably cost you some money up front. Most labor and employment lawyers will charge you somewhere in the neighborhood of $300, depending on the legal market in your area, for a one-hour consultation. You may be able to find one who’ll meet with you for free, especially if a simple summary of your situation makes it sound like you might be the one-in-a-hundred case of outrageous unlawful discrimination. If this is the case, the lawyer might be eager to take you on a “contingent fee” basis, but I wouldn’t count on it.  

Additionally, it may be a little bit of a logistical challenge if you don’t already know who to call.  You’ll be making a bunch of phone calls, asking people you know only slightly to give you the names of people they know only slightly who might know a good lawyer to refer you to.

But if you’re not willing to cough up a little bit of dough and put some work into finding a lawyer, you clearly aren’t very motivated to make lemonade out of your employment lemon.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you care so little about your situation, the best thing you can do is take the hit and move on.

On the flip side, if you find a good lawyer, you’ll get a good opportunity to evaluate your legal rights and your goals.   With a little luck, the lawyer could help you negotiate an improved severance package – and that alone will likely justify the cost. 

With a little more luck, a lot more effort, and greater expense, a lawyer might even be able to help you address and achieve your primary goal in the situation – whether that is getting your job back, getting a lot of money from your former employer, regaining your self-respect, or even obtaining some modicum of justice.

But even if your one-hour meeting with the lawyer convinces you that nothing can or should be done to help your situation, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve evaluated the situation properly.  You won’t have to wonder, going forward, whether you did the right thing, or used good judgment, or (to the contrary) got snookered, intimidated, or needlessly took a flop. 

Cost of the lawyer: $300. Peace of mind: priceless.