Posted on May 21st, 2019
Below is a full transcript of this video.
How’s it going fellow entrepreneurs? Today, I want to talk about retaliation claims, and how devastating they can be in California. I had a client call me up and wanted to get rid of a client that was a complete pain, because he complained too much.
I asked for the details, and some of the things he was complaining about are things that are actionable in law. My advice was, “Don’t fire this guy, at least not yet.” The response from this client was, “This guy is such a problem that they’re willing to risk the retaliation claims.”
I said, “Okay, let me just give you a list of the largest retaliation claims that have happened in California, and then you tell me if you want to take that risk.” I just figured this was a good opportunity to let everybody out there running businesses in California know how serious retaliation claims are.
Okay so I googled the largest wrongful termination verdicts in California, and here’s the list that came up.
All right so let me give you the case details first. All right, the first one is a case from 2017 and it said, “Plaintiff was a salesperson who complained about other sales people were breaking FDA law by promoting products they shouldn’t be promoting in their sales.
The company retaliated by demoting, increases his quota, taking away good territory and then firing him.” You’d be shocked at what the jury awarded for this. It’s not even worth guessing, ’cause it’s such a large number. They awarded him $251,00000, right? This guy wouldn’t have earned that in 10 lifetimes, just insanity.
I’m just going to go through the top three. All right so the second one was a case from 2013 and basically plaintiff, a customer service rep probably a little over minimum wage had a mental illness and was fired for it. The award for that was $21700000″, that, okay.
Last one, 2016 case, the facts are “Plaintiff, a timeshare sales representative for Wyndham was fired after protesting sales practices which were elder abuse. The award for that was 20 million dollars.” You can see I mean some of these are egregious such as the mental illness one and complaining about elder abuse.
I mean these are fairly egregious, but you can see how large these things are. Let me look for one that’s a smaller one. Okay the smallest one I have on the list is okay a 2013 case. “Plaintiff developed an eye condition which led to more errors at work. The company did not try to reasonably accommodate her, and eventually terminated her for an increase in errors.
The award for that was $1178000. Okay you can see that retaliation claims are no joke, they’re nothing to be messed around with. Whether an employee is a pain in the but or not, if it could potentially be a retaliation claim, you’d have to be really, really, really careful.
All right guys, until next time, thanks.
