The first thing that happens even before we have our first consultation is that we review your written employment contract (if you had one) and any other relevant paperwork that you had signed during your work to determine if you and your employer had agreed what you would be owed if your employment was terminated. If you did have a written employment contract, we will read it very closely to see if it was valid, and if any of the limitations it imposed were legally binding.
If you had no written contract, or we believe that your written contract was not legally binding, we assess your case based on judge-made law and cases of other people who have been in similar scenarios. The law looks at 4 key factors – your age, how long you were with the employer, the nature of the work that you were doing, and your likelihood of finding something new. This is all a rough analysis of how long it might reasonably take you to find new employment. We say that calculating this number is an art, not a science, but we have some helpful tools that we use to support our assessment, such as the questionnaire you filled out prior to your consultation which provides us with extremely helpful data. Learn more about that here.
