Oftentimes when clients come to us, they are extremely distraught and emotional, because they just lost their job. Losing one’s job is a very significant event, it can be devastating when someone particularly has been there a long time, it can be devastating from the standpoint that how am I now going to feed my family? There are lots of reasons why it’s so devastating to lose a job and that is part and parcel of what we do here. It’s not just about the legal issues. Every case needs three things in order to be a viable case. The first thing is there has to be a violation of law. The second thing, there has to be damages that flow from that violation of law. And the third thing is, who you’re suing needs to actually be collectible, in other words you could get a ten-million-dollar verdict, but if they only have ten dollars, then it’s an empty verdict. And one of the things that we do, is we look at our clients as the whole person and it’s not just the loss to their pocketbook, that’s easily quantifiable, what did they lose in income, what did they lose in wages, what did they lose in benefits, what are all the little perks that they lost? The biggest loss, sometimes the most devastating loss, is the loss to the person. By being thrown out, by being fired because of some protected category, like their age, or gender, or disability, or race, or national origin, or pregnancy, or because they raised issues that they thought were illegal and became a whistleblower. When emotionally, when the reason that we’re fired is inconsistent with our traditional sense of fairness and equity, it really increases the emotional distress that someone suffers. We work with a range of psychologists and psychiatrist to fully develop what has happened to a person, so we can present to a judge and to a jury, how much the loss of a job has effected a person, and very often, the loss to the person is much greater than the loss to the wallet.
