Posted on July 2nd, 2019
Below is a complete transcript of this video.
What’s going on fellow entrepreneurs? It’s John Fagerholm again, from defendmybiz.com.
Today I want to talk about suing your employee. I know that sounds like a waste of time and money to a lot of employers, however, a lot of times when you fire somebody, you’ll fire them for a reason, such as they stole money or defamation, that’s a big one.
A lot of things that they could have done to harm your business. Starting their own competing business and stealing clients, that’s another big one I run across.
A lot of times business owners just want to get rid of the person and leave it at that. However, sometimes the employee will come back and sue the business owner for labor claims.
When it comes to labor claims it’s very difficult to win, and it’s very difficult to get out of them unscathed.
So, if you have a claim, even though it seems like it’s going to cost more money and up the legal expenses, because now you’ve either sued first, or you’ve countersued from the labor claims, it’s very valuable and I think it’s a good strategy.
Because when you get sued for a labor claim, basically all the odds are stacked against you. What ends up happening is you’re just playing a game of how much money can I give you to go away and leave me alone.
Whereas, if you have claims yourself, and you counter sue with your claims, now it becomes a risk to the other side, also.
Besides the risk to the former employee that sued you, there’s also a bigger risk to the attorney now, because if they’re going to defend that claim that you have, they’re going to be spending double the money that they would be spending and they don’t get their attorney’s fees on the defense side of things.
So basically, even if this were to go all the way and they were to win attorney’s fees, they’ve spent twice the money on their end and they’ve only recovered half the attorneys’ fees.
Basically the attorney’s fees on their claims. So that’s why it’s a good strategy. It helps settlement and it also helps reduce the amount of the labor claims or reduce the amount that you would typically settle for.
The other thing to is, a lot of times you’ll have a claim against a former employee and then you’ll start getting threats that they’re going to sue you for labor claims.
Well, if you’ve got claims there’s nothing in the law stopping you from suing first. Right? Typically that’s a good strategy if you know that they’re going to sue because it’s not going to make a difference in the cost of the lawsuit.
What it does do though is, it makes it settle much quicker. Because now because of getting a labor lawsuit, what you’ll typically get is an attorney on the other side that says, “Hey, before I have to do a bunch of work to respond to your suit and to file my countersuit which is all the labor claims, why don’t we try to settle this out.” And it usually ends up becoming a settlement, even though you’re the one that sued first.
Becomes a settlement where you pay out much less on the labor claims.
So, from my perspective always better to have claims that you can either sue for first or counter sue.
Until next time, thanks a lot everybody.
Bye.
