What is the benefit of a large lawyer team? A pretty common trope in different kinds of media is the idea that large corporations or rich people can screw people like they want and get away with it, because they have oh so many lawyers at their disposal. Mr. Burns from the simpsons comes to my mind immediately. Is there any truth behind this assumption? Can a large lawyer team render you invulnerable to certain lawsuits? I have no experience with any real applications of jurisprudence, so I find it really strange. Some points I can think of: When the lawsuit is so large and complicated that you need the manpower to sift through all its aspects. Still, if you poisoned an ecosystem your guilt should be provable and you would be condemned no matter the number of lawyers. Intimidating your opponent with the number of your lawyers to make them concede to a extrajudicial solution. It's just a code for bribing the judges. But none of those would explain this phenomenon properly. Is it even a real thing?
There are times when having a large law firm work on a case can be an advantage. It is rare for the number of lawyers working on a particular case to be more than three or four plus a few paralegals, even in a case where there are virtually unlimited resources at a party's disposal. In those cases, the primary benefit of having a large law firm at your disposal is that by paying top dollar for those attorneys, you may (but certainly don't always) get particularly competent attorneys at firms that have good systems in place. If you are willing to spend the money you can also have the attorney and paralegal team work exhaustively to leave no stone unturned in terms of legal research, style and proofreading, &quot;wild goose chase&quot; factual and legal research of matters like trial court arguments from other cases that the opposing counsel has participated in, and trial presentations with lavish presentation quality. For example, in one case where my firm was litigating against a large law firm in state supreme court arguments, the firm had seven law firm partners who had served as clerks in that court earlier in their careers participate in mock oral arguments to help the appellate lawyer who would be presented the case in oral arguments to the Colorado Supreme Court prepare (with four members of your core team and seven mock justices plus some paralegals participating this was a $5000+ per hour activity). A typical run of the mill appellate brief prepared competently might take 100 hours, while a large firm might devote 800 hours to the same task (both of these are hypothetical round numbers suggested just to get the point across). This incredibly intense working up of cases, moreover, often involves attorneys who aren't really starting from scratch as they has handled many similar cases before in their careers, while their smaller firm competition may have only encountered the issues presented for the first time. You are also paying for connections and experience. For example, a large law firm may have an easier time retaining the most decorated expert witnesses to argue on their behalf. These attorneys may also have handled numerous cases in front of the judge or judges who will be deciding the case (and if they haven't someone else in the large firm probably has) and thus can better predict what approach will be received best by that particular judge. The exception to the rule that the maximal economies of scale are reached with a quite small group of lawyers is that in addition to this core group of lawyers, some cases, such as class action lawsuits, or cases involving complex transactions (e.g. construction project disputes in a large project with hundreds of contractors) may require an immense amount of factual discovery in the trial court in the form of depositions of dozens or hundreds of people with relevant knowledge, and/or review of vast volumes of documents (e.g. I've had several cases with whole rooms stacked floor to ceiling with relevant documents in banker's boxes). In cases like those, you need an army of senior paralegals and junior attorneys to interview witnesses, take depositions and review and summarize documents to get to the bottom of the factual matters needed to prove a case. The down side of this approach, however, is that it is extremely expensive relative to the alternatives per task, and frequently impossible to recover your costs and attorney fees from the other party, perhaps because they aren't permitted to be awarded, perhaps because a judge would find some or all of your fees and costs to be unreasonable, or perhaps because the other side simply can't afford to pay them. So, using a firm like this really only makes sense if the stakes involved are very high, or if there are long term strategic reasons to litigate. Spending $1,000,000 on attorneys' fees and costs is a very expensive way to litigate a $100,000 one off dispute. But spending $1,000,000 on attorneys' fees and costs is perfectly sensible if there is $100,000,000 in controversy in the case at hand, or if a favorable outcome will influence the outcome of a large number of future disputed of the same type. The other dirty little secret is that lots of the work done by large law firms for which their clients pay an immense amount of money isn't done very well. One inherent down side of being large is that a large law firm is bureaucratic and prone to the kinds of mistakes that all large organizations have, for example, in diffusing responsibility for mistakes that can allow mistakes to fall through the cracks. Also, while the typical large law firm lawyer is typically more knowledgable than the typical small firm lawyer about the field at issue, this doesn't always happen. Sometimes junior attorneys get assigned too much responsibility on cases in areas where they have blind spots in their knowledge, and sometimes a large firm attorney ends up working a case due to personal connections with the client rather than because that attorney is the most qualified person in the firm to handle it. Also, while some very brilliant lawyers do indeed work at large law firms, technical competence isn' the only consideration in hiring. Successful large firm lawyers need to be team players, need to conform and function well in a large bureaucracy, and need to have the social capital to be comfortable on a day to day basis with the firm's other lawyers and their affluent and big business clients. Many large firm lawyers have those soft skills while having only competent rather than excellent legal acumen. Further, since most large law firm lawyers go straight from law school to a big firm (sometimes with a detour clerking for a judge for a couple of years), and large law firms handle mostly very big cases that are usually settled by lead attorneys before going to trial, most large law firm attorneys aren't particularly experienced at trial work. Some large law firms compensate for that by laterally hiring former prosecutors, former criminal defense lawyers and former high volume personal injury litigators to do that work, but often, large law firms have few lawyers in the courtroom with much trial experience relative to how many years they have practiced law. They may be very well prepared, but often there is no substitute for hands on trial experience. Still large law firms tend to fight extremely hard in trial, but tend to be pushovers in settlement discussions. This is driven by the reality that the client will incur huge amounts of attorneys fees and costs to go the distance, and by the fact that professionally, the worst thing that a large firm lawyer can do it to have an unexpected and unpredictable bad outcome at trial. So, large firm attorneys seek to give their clients low expectations about what is possible in litigation in order to make it possible to make cases with significant uncertainty go away with settlements larger than would really have been necessary to settle the case with a more total client litigation and settlement cost sensitive law firm.
For instance, clients often ask them for an assessment of &quot;the chance of X going through&quot;. While clients can make it clear (in writing) that lawyers will not be held legally liable for giving &quot;pure advice&quot;, lawyers often still refuse to give any guidance (even when they clearly do have one in mind). I do this on a regular basis. This said, lawyers are ill equipped to evaluate cases in these terms, because they don't see a full and unbiased sample of cases that they study academically, because there are too many distinctions between cases to make apples to apples comparisons of them, and because most lawyers went into law because they don't like thinking about things in mathematical terms. Lawyers will not infrequently say that a case or argument is strong or weak, or very strong or virtually frivolous, but evaluating the strength of a case is difficult and there are good academic studies that show that lawyers systemically overestimate the strength of their own cases. So, humility about the likelihood of a particular outcome is a good professional norm to have in place. Basically, law contains lots of uncertainty and the known unknowns and unknown unknowns predominate over what is known, most of the time.
Lawyers are useful in litigation the way engineers are useful construction or doctors are useful in surgery The know what they’re doing and have done it many times before: you haven’t. In your particular situation your lawyer can advise you if you actually have a case worth pursuing and the best way to do so. In most jurisdictions lawyers cannot represent you in small claims court but they can handle your application and coach you in advance. As to your final question: lawyers are professionals and it’s frankly insulting to suggest that a professional would deliberately mislead for personal gain - the overwhelming majority won’t and the tiny fraction that will are criminals.
The defense lawyer has the duty to do the best for his client. The client will be convicted if he or she is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. If the lawyer can create a reasonable doubt and manages to free his client then he has done a good job. So yes, if the lawyer knows that some other person might have committed the crime, to the degree that it creates reasonable doubt, then the lawyer must raise this. Of course if it turns out that there is just some phantasist making wild accusations, that might not be helpful.
How should I proceed? I am asking law friends to recommend some employment lawyers, but other than this, can I do anything else? You definitely don't need an employment lawyer for this. From a legal standpoint, the matter is very simple: If you grant their request (whether by signing or otherwise expressing your acceptance), you would be waiving any remedies currently available to you for their breach of contract. The company's attempt to override its contract with you is quite naive, but the company can always (and evidently does) try to get away with its liability nonetheless. I would not be surprised if the company subsequently tries harder to intimidate you, but that does not change your legal position &amp; merits unless you sign the waiver the company is pursuing. Asking for your post-termination availability reinforces the notion of company's poor planning and subpar management.
Typically in defamation law, claims made persuiant to litigation are not defamatory, since they are going to be tested for validity if the case goes to trial. I'm not familiar with any differences in what is generally done in settlements between the U.K. and the U.S., but since both are Common Law countries, and Settlements are very common in civil proceedings in the U.S., it's a good start. Generally a settlemant can occur anytime before the verdict of the case is rendered, although usually it will happen after preliminary hearings during the Discovery phase. In the U.S., Discovery is very broad and one need not prove that the requested items contain evidence but might contain evidence. This means that, for example, you could request a substantial amount of e-mail records from the opposing party because somewhere on the company e-mail server, there might be something to help your case. And even if after you sift through the emails and find no smoking guns related to your case, you could find some dirty laundry that's unrelated but still damning... if not more so than the initial case. Many people, especially big compainies, would rather just give the ex-employee some what he/she wants, if it means they don't get to see the proverbial man behind the curtain. Additionally the practice might fall into a legally gray area of the law that, if it reaches trial, could hurt the company or even the industry if a judge rules against the company, effectively saying that this gray area is now definately illegal. Better to eat the loss of capital with the settling out of court than to take the much larger hit of the buisness practice being illegalized all together. Typically in settlements, both parties agree to terms and sign a contract. While the whole of the terms are never discussed, almost all include that the plaintiff will drop the case and never bring the matter to court again and that both parties will sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) meaning that they won't discuss the rest of the settlement terms with anyone not party to them. If the plaintiff does break the NDA, the defendant can sue for breech of contract and recover at the least the monitary compensation they awarded in the settlement. Conversely, if the respondent breaks the NDA, the plaintiff can refile their initial suit with the addition of breech of contract (and this time it will get to court... and all the dirty laundry sees the harsh light of day.). While the respondent in a settled case can possibly sue for defamation if the plaintiff said the respondent did what the initial suit claimed they did (legally, it was never proven or disproven), or they were guilty (again, since no verdict was reached at trial, no guilt was established), the breech of contract is a much more airtight case and doesn't open up discovery to the respondent's cupability in the settled case (since the breech is about discussing the settled case at all, not the validity of the accusations of the settled case). Typically they would not go this route because then it opens the can of worms the settlement was trying to keep a lid on.
Whether any person, provided that they are in full legal capacity (not a minor, not incapacitated etc.), needs a lawyer, is to be decided by that person. Even criminal defendants can be self-represented if they've got the balls for it — the law does not impose a requirement to have a lawyer when the person does not want it. Considerations as to whether to have a lawyer are very fact-specific and person-specific. Assuming that Steve is not literate in law, it would probably be good idea for him to get a lawyer before answering any questions. The facts are such that it is not totally impossible that he may be charged, especially if he inadvertently says something not in his favor, or otherwise says something favorable to McRobberface.
What you describe is forbidden by corporate law in every jurisdiction with which I'm familiar. I don't know the law in Quebec, but in principle: An entity in control of a corporation can't use that control to unjustly enrich himself at the expense of other shareholders. (If he does so through deceit then he is committing the common law tort of fraud, and quite likely a criminal offense.) A trustee or fiduciary that uses his control of assets to enrich himself at the expense of those to whom he owes a duty (e.g., minority shareholders) is guilty of various statutory offenses, among which may be "Breach of Fiduciary Duty" and "Fraudulent transfer." Sales of corporate assets in general must be done through an "arms-length" mechanism. If they are being auctioned off, and the auction isn't open, so that an insider is able to purchase them below "fair market value," then, once again, a fraud has been committed. The grading and remedies vary by jurisdiction. Of course, whether it's worth pursuing a remedy through legal action depends (as always) on: the amount at stake, the cost of pursuing the remedy, statutory allowances for punitive damages, the likelihood and cost of collecting on any judgement won. Only a lawyer familiar with the jurisdiction, the complaint, and the corporation's governing documents could help you answer that question.