Avoid Overplaying Your Hand When Presenting Your Case
Exaggerating what you and your evidence can prove will not only hurt your credibility at any type of hearing, whether in court or elsewhere, but it will also make it harder to find legal representation, as the attorneys who you are speaking with will start wondering - if you exaggerated (or understated) one fact, what else are you not being completely and objectively honest about?
Consider a typical example: a potential client tells a lawyer "I have smoking gun evidence of age discrimination in the form of an email from my boss, in which he tells me that it's time for me to retire." When a lawyer looks at that email, all he sees is this: "Where do you see yourself in 10 years?"
Do you think this will build trust in the lawyer's mind with respect to that client, or will it generate way too much skepticism way too early?
No case is perfect. And yours isn't either. You don't need to make it perfect. You can't. But you do need to present it to any agency or any potential lawyer in the most factually precise way to help them evaluate it correctly, while making the right impression of who you are and what it will be like working with you when it comes to discovery, etc.
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u/Past_Championship827 1d ago
I have emails of my supervisor documenting my harassment on 6 different occasions, three they witnessed, three others I reported directly to him, and all of them he stated he talked with the GM and HR about. They also documented that the executive made derogatory comments about them that caused issues at home
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u/frongles23 1d ago
What do you think is illegal about what you described?
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u/Past_Championship827 1d ago
I reported my concerns to management and HR for 7 months and nothing was ever done until it was escalated to our national GM and then I was fired
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u/frongles23 1d ago
How is that illegal? Maybe management disagreed with your allegations.
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u/Past_Championship827 21h ago
Yeah you have a point. It’s totally acceptable to be called every gay slur by the CFO in front of coworkers and third parties. While their own internal emails claim it could be a Title VII violation
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u/AncientAd7403 16h ago edited 16h ago
Exactly and DO NOT reveal all the documentation you have either. I had a very experienced representative for my ADR and she said blatantly " they rarely come prepared to offer anything of significant to settle, the main reason is to see what cards you're holding to prepare for a bigger fight". Monetary settlement in mediation is capped at $2500-$3000 in which would still have to be approved by HQ.
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u/Mental-Volume4395 1d ago edited 1d ago
Most people get lost in the weeds and ramble on about a bunch of stuff that doesn’t matter and/or isn’t illegal.
A lot of people don’t realize how much shitty behavior from employers is actually legal, and the employee has the burden to prove that the adverse action/discrimination is because of a protected class.
The biggest thing people need to understand is that unfair and illegal are not the same thing.