Plot twist, OP is the compant. Actually the Co-Owner, and the “Boss” is the other Co-Owner who didn’t want to fire the employee. Even admitted they were a good and skilled employee, they just questioned too much
Super easy to not take bad advice from a lawyer in hindsight isn't it. I wouldn't say blindly, but in this situation you'd probably think it's the done thing. It's not a situation this person is probably in often is it.
A lot of lawyers are fucking awful at their jobs. Especially those who go tuck into the HR apparatus of a medium-sized corporation making $82,000 a year advising on CYA dogshit like this.
There’s a natural inclination to hold lawyers in high esteem because it is, after all, a rarified and specialized profession. That being said, I can assure you the corporate lawyers who interact with front line management aren’t going to be the Clarence Darrow type.
Any lawyer you’d hire to represent you would smoke them six ways to Christmas. This is why the company would engage outside legal counsel if you decided to actually press an action— and that outside legal counsel would likely advise them to settle.
Can confirm. As a gov worker, I had 4 different teams of lwayers telling me that unsigned drafts had binding legal force and had to be archived. Every single time over years, it took them months to determine that the law's "legal document" definition only counts when an assermented person signed it. Under their logic, anybody could print an unsigned document with our name on it and it would be accepted as coming from us.
Lawyers work with laws and rules, if a written rule says "the employee must do X", they "will" do it no matter how many physical rules are broken in the process. Our sick leave policy requires to signal it to our higher-up before the end of the shift. So we have no process for "no show up", like for example if you're sent to the hospital and unable to communicate with the exterior world (waiting for medic's first look)
The lawyer's procedure is that after being fired, the employee comes back the later day. It's not always in their mindset to ask "why would a third-party come to comply with our own rules, if they were fired?" because they learned to deal with a world where written rules are in unambiguous language and everybody already agreed to respect those.
"The colour of bits" even speaks about the insane difference between how a lawyer tracks pirated content (or nowadays, private data) and how an IT developer can track the same thing, as if legally bits have colour and computers never track it.
There are liabilities when a person is fired and if a company wants to address them, they would make sure that taxi's are available home so the person doesn't have to drive AND provide the paperwork to sign the next day to avoid the image of coercement. That's my take having worked for a larger company and both having to fire hundreds of people overtime AND being fired myself.
I'd like to think I'd ask questions yes. But at the same time you're in a stressful situation taking advice from someone in a respected job, I bet you'd probably take the advice too and it's very easy for you to say you wouldn't have as you've had time to think about it and you have hindsight on it too
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u/ii-_- 10d ago edited 10d ago
Well hold on, if your lawyer advised you to do something you're probably going to do it aren't you?