I always find it funny the cycles that our law firm goes through. It could be a few weeks, a few months, or even sometimes a year before we deal with a certain type of law. Whether it be Construction Liens, registering a Certificate of Pending Litigation onto a property, or a will drafting, we always have those periods of time where that’s all it seems to be.
The one thing that does seem to be consistent is employment issues. I think that’s because we are the full-service business law firm to our clients. We assist in incorporating, to drafting employment contract, and even employee handbooks.
We always impress upon our clients to reach out to our offices before they terminate employees. Even then, you’d be surprised when we got those emails from our clients stating that they terminated an employee without consulting our offices, and then having to respond to a lawyer for failure to provide the right amount of notice, or pay in lieu of notice.
Scenario:
The ask from the client: We terminated an employee without cause, they weren’t performing as we expected, and we have a letter from their lawyer saying we owe them $2,000.00. What do we do?
Question. Did they sign the contract that we drafted for you?
Response 1. Contract? Were they supposed to sign the contract?
Response 2. Yes they did, it was signed a week after they started.
Response 3. Yes, and there was a change made to the amount of notice required to be provided.
None of these are the responses that we want to hear.
There are so many different moving parts when it comes to hiring and terminating employees and for that reason, we carefully draft the employment contracts for our clients.
Employment law is evolving almost on a daily basis, and we strive to keep on top of all the leading cases law. Before you go ahead and make those changes to the agreements, or before terminating, you would be best served to reach out Inga B. Andriessen before you do anything that could cost you in the future.
Why not start off 2019 right?
Christine Allan, Law Clerk