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How Much Is My Employment Case Worth?

What Will I Recover In My New Jersey Employment Law Case?

The value of an employment case is a complicated thing to determine. Trial lawyers often remark to one another that litigation is as much an art as it is a science. For mathematicians, 2 + 2 is always 4. To an artist, beauty is entirely in the eye of the beholder. To a trial lawyer, we often have to marry science, math and art to arrive at the “best” result.

I often tell clients, mediators and judges that if the same fact pattern with identical witness testimony and evidence was tried in front of ten different juries, we’d get ten different results. So when a client asks “how much is my case worth?” it’s always a bit of a judgment call.

That being said, that judgment does come from over two decades of trying hundreds of cases and representing many thousands of clients, and from teaching this work to other lawyers and from leadership in the bar in this area.

What Affects The Value Of My New Jersey Employment Case?

First and foremost, the primary factor affecting the value of your case is you, the type of person you are:

  • Are you a good communicator?
  • Do you tell a good story honestly and forthrightly?
  • Are you a good historian?
  • Do you remember things pretty routinely and uniformly the right way because you are always telling the truth about them?

All of those things first and foremost affect your credibility and your “likability.” Juries are made up of human beings, and to human beings, this is an important factor.

The next most important factor in how much your case is worth is whether or not there are strong supportive witnesses who are independent (or at least somewhat independent) who tell a story that dovetails, or is consistent, with yours. We also have to compare that with how many witnesses the defendant has telling their story. We have to know what your losses – economic and medical (if any) – are, and how clear (or unclear) they may be.

The strength of your own expert witnesses, if any, is also a factor. Are your doctors and economists and policy experts good communicators? Are they foremost and most importantly experts who very rarely venture into court, or do they routinely testify in front of juries?

As much as we’d like to think that we as trial lawyers are the primary arbiters of how well a case does in front of a jury, the fact of the matter is that while our skill, inspiration, experience and aplomb on our feet is very important, the most important factors in the case are the “facts” themselves; most importantly, the chief factor is you.

Unsure If Your Case Is Worth Pursuing?

The true value of your case isn’t always a number. Particularly in employment law cases, the value of your case may be in getting your job back, stopping workplace harassment or vindicating your belief that what you were exposed to or put up with on the job was in fact illegal. Whether a case is worth pursuing depends on what you are looking to get out of it.

At Costello, Mains & Silverman, LLC, our attorneys offer a free consultation in all employment law cases. Call our law office today to schedule an initial consultation with a New Jersey lawyer to discuss your questions about pursuing a lawsuit against your employer. Our firm can also be reached online.