Discussing Your Orange County Discrimination Case
If you are considering filing an employment law-related action against your employer for any reason, there are several things you should keep in mind. An Orange County employment attorney can tell you what to do and what not to do specific to your case, but here are some general guidelines.
It is crucial that you refrain from using your employer’s communication devices at work to communicate anything about your case. Many employees don’t hesitate to use their employer’s telephones, fax machines, and email addresses to discuss their case with their attorney or other parties. This can be a disastrous move.
Employers are often able to record all telephone calls from within the company and use fax machines that store copies of all incoming and outgoing faxes. E-mails are almost always archived by employees on backup servers and offsite locations. Your Orange County employment attorney will need his or her privileged communications kept private, and the law is unclear as to whether privilege applies if an employee uses a communication device belonging to the employer. To be safe, it is important that you not use any of your employer’s communication devices to discuss the case.
It is also important that you not communicate with anyone else other than your attorney about your case. Discussions with other parties are not protected by privilege and can come back to harm your case. Any conversation you have with someone else about your case can be brought up and questioned in detail during deposition, and the other parties may be summoned for deposition, increasing the length and cost needed to work on your case.
Two examples illustrate this. In one case, a plaintiff told his best friend the minimum amount of money he would accept as a settlement offer. This amount was far lower than even his attorney’s low-ball estimates of the value of the case. At mediation, the defendant employer made a final offer of exactly the “bottom line” amount the plaintiff had told his friend. The plaintiff found out that his best friend had told someone else, and the information had leaked back to the employer.
In another example, a plaintiff spoke to her boyfriend about her lawyer’s opinion on the merits and weaknesses of the case, including whom the plaintiff could bring as witnesses and whom she should hope the employer could not locate and interview. The plaintiff later cheated on her boyfriend and was caught, and he subsequently told everything he knew to the defendant employer.
If you have further questions about how to handle your employment case, contact the Orange County employment attorneys at the Daily Aljian firm today. The initial consultation is free of charge.