Review of Severance Agreements
Severance Agreements And Employment Law Violations
At Costello, Mains & Silverman, LLC, we focus our employment practice on trying cases for employees whose rights have been violated. We are trial attorneys with extensive experience in a wide variety of employment claims under New Jersey and federal law. Because our firm chooses to engage in substantive and affirmative litigation on behalf of litigants, we no longer offer the “transactional service” of sitting down and reviewing a severance agreement for a flat or hourly based fee. We’ve simply found that our time is better spent taking more substantive matters that we intend to take into court and over which we intend to file litigation.
This doesn’t mean that we won’t look at your severance agreement. If we think that the “severance agreement” is really cover for trying to settle claims that we’d otherwise take into court, then we’ll review that agreement in concert with starting substantive representation on some affirmative employment claims.
On the other hand, if we think that the only issue, once we’ve spoken to you, is that the severance agreement is confusing and that you have some questions, we’ll probably refer you to an attorney who can charge a more modest fee for the meeting, for the review and for any correspondence with the employer that you want to hire the lawyer to undertake.
If we think the claims are there, however, we’ll attempt to negotiate better “severance” (meaning, a settlement of the claims that we feel are there) on a contingent basis. That allows us to accept the risks, rather than you.