As an employer facing a lawsuit, it can be difficult to know how to choose a good attorney to represent your business and your side of the story.
With 26 years of experience defending employers throughout Southern California, Lisa Sherman has all the answers you need about what to consider when hiring employment counsel.
Here are her three main tips.
Number One: Your Initial Consultation Should Be Comprehensive
It is key in any type of situation that your initial consultation with any lawyer is comprehensive.
Provide documents of whatever issues are going on beforehand and consider these questions when you meet with this lawyer:
- Does this lawyer understand your problem?
- Do they have a grasp of the facts based on what you provided to them?
- Perhaps most importantly, who’s going to be handling this matter? If the person sitting across from you is the partner, but he’s going to hand it off to someone else to handle, then there’s always the chance that you’re going to be double-billed, and that the person who’s at the higher billing level is not going to have the same command of the case as the junior associate also working on your case.
Employment cases are very fact-specific and very personal. The entire case is about two relationships:
- Your relationships with your employees (who your attorney will interview and represent at depositions), and
- Your relationship and connection with that lawyer.
Number Three: A Game Plan
Lastly, it’s important that when you walk out the door from the initial consultation you’re walking out with a game plan.
You do not want a lawyer who is just going to agree with everything you’re saying, tell you the claims are frivolous, and promise the case is going to go away.
On the contrary, when you come into that meeting and you provide information, that lawyer should be doing a factual and legal investigation and then proposing to you:
- A game plan
- A budget
- Cost-effective strategies and solutions
Nine times out of ten, employers do not understand all the many many employment laws and how they can be held liable even if they didn’t intend it or didn’t know about what was going on.
So the attorneys who discuss with you the risks, the liability, and the solutions at the outset are the ones you want to hire to be your employment counsel.
Contact The Sherman Law Corporation Today
Each member of the Sherman Law Corporation team learns the details and facts of our clients’ stories intimately, allowing us to communicate with our clients and give them the best representation possible.
We not only make sure to give our clients a full understanding of the case and its various potential outcomes from the get-go, but we also offer a variety of other services to keep employers out of these types of issues to begin with.
Get in touch with us today for more information about our services and how we can help with your case.