I’m often asked about the law around job references after you have left a job: “Do I have to give a reference?”, “Am I entitled to a reference?”, “What am I allowed to say in a reference?” First off, after a dismissal, employers are NOT legally required to give former employees references. Although, it may be in an employer’s interest to give a reference because it enables an employee to find a new job - thus do what lawyers call “mitigate damages”. That is, an employer can argue that an employee is entitled to less severance pay because they haven’t looked hard enough for a job. Providing a job reference to an employee is one way in which an employer can a former find that new job.
An employer is NOT required to give positive job references - a fact that many employees find surprising. In fact, an employer may find themselves in hot water if they write a reference for an employee, knowing that another employer will rely on that reference, and they write something that they know is untrue. In that case, an employer is “negligently misrepresenting” a former employee’s qualifications.
On the other hand, an employer cannot say malicious things about an employee. If an employer, for whatever reason, will write a negative reference, then they need to make absolutely sure that they can back up what they say. It’s not good enough for them to say: “David was a poor performer.”. It would be more accurate to say, “For two years in a row, David failed to achieve sales targets, of which he himself established.” This enables the employer to fall within the “qualified privilege” and “fair comment” defences to the very complex law around libel and slander law.
These are fairly theoretical circumstances. Basic common sense should rule the day:

• If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say it.
• If you are going to say something about someone, stick to the facts and tell the truth.

We’ve been working hard to improve FiredWithoutCause.com. We’ve recently received our new dataset and are performing our normal quality assurance checks. Once we have them, we can provide all of our customers with fully linked cases rather than a mix of linked and unlinked cases. We will also be rolling out our revamped customer experience which we think you’ll all much prefer. Talk to you soon!

The National, the Canadian Bar Association’s magazine has recognized http://www.firedwithoutcause.com:

By automating and streamlining necessary but straightforward and/or repetitive tasks, sites such as … FiredWithoutCause can offer legal services more quickly and cheaply than the average law firm associate, or even the average legal secretary.  And by lowering or outright eliminating the bar on legal fees, they can tap into … the average consumer or small business owner who would never consult a lawyer because they find lawyers too expensive.  (S. Goldberg, “The new competition”, National, December 2009, pp. 8-9)

At Paradigm Shift Solutions, we believe that improving access to justice in Canada will not improve by asking lawyers to increase pro bono or volunteer work or working for less.  We can improve access to justice by creating new business models that empower Canadians with legal information and provide proportionately priced services.

A big thank you to http://www.law21.ca and Jordan Fulong for nominating our blog for the 2009 Clawbies.  We didn’t seek or expect the nomination, but we thank this prominent Canadian legal blogger for noting us.  We intend to keep on giving Canadians plain language information about severance packages, wrongful dismissal, and employment law.

http://www.law21.ca/2009/12/07/2009-clawbies-now-accepting-nominations/

We here at FiredWithoutCause.com want to wish everyone the best of the holiday season. We will be taking a short holiday from blogging until the new year. However, when we return, you’ll see more information about calculating severance packages, wrongful dismissal, pregnancy and severance, negotiation techniques, and so much more. We look forward to seeing you again in 2010!

Hi everyone, apologies for not being in more regular touch with all of you.  For what it’s worth, my wife and I just had our first baby and I took some time off from my outreach activities to enjoy these first few days.  Thanks to my business partner, Jim Hamlin, for keeping our business going.

While we’ve been a bit silent, we’ve been busy.  I thought I would update you on some of the improvements that we have been working on:

• re-working our customer experience and intend to roll out a new user interface and workflow very shortly.  Thanks to everyone for your great feedback on how to improve our service.
• working on a major upgrade to our database.  After our upgrade, we will have more indexed, publicly accessible cases than any of our competitors.  We are working on providing full-text cases for most, if not all, of our indexed cases. This upgrade is a major effort for us as we comb through decades of case research.  After our upgrade though, we can provide summary results that are more comprehensive, accurate, and relevant.
• making it easier for repeat customers to access information in their accounts.

In related products, our company Paradigm Shift Solutions is working on two other products to bring “law to the people” and we’re pretty excited about that too.  Keep checking for more information.

Meanwhile, check out our new temporary home page and media page where we have listed all of the fantastic media coverage we have received over the past three since our opening.  I am especially proud to say that the Canadian Bar Association’s magazine recently covered us in their October/November issue as a “sign of the future” in the legal profession.  As a lawyer myself, it’s nice to know that we are doing something to improve access to justice for Canadians:  http://www.cba.org/CBA/PracticeLink/leadership_technology/online_services.aspx.

Big thanks to Ms. Connie Crosby, a blogger at www.slaw.ca (her communications practice website) for her great article on FiredWithoutCause.com and the future of the legal industry.

The interview discusses some of the technology and social changes that are shaping the legal industry.  The web is dramatically changing the way people treat knowledge, and legal knowledge is no exception.  Lawyers must wrestle with this fundamental question: how can legal organizations operate in a world where data and opinions are free on the web?  In that world, what economic value do lawyers generate that customers are prepared to pay for?  Technological, social, and demographic forces are changing the value that interpreters of law bring to society and the profession hasn’t really kept up. We still operate with the same theories that may have applied 200 years ago, but no longer.  This interview touches on some of those ideas.  Would love to know what you think.

Some of our customers have asked us to provide them with edited reports that show only cases that have hyperlinks to cases that courts have published online.  I’d like to explain briefly present the court results in the way that we have.

We have stated on our website that courts across Canada have not uniformly published the results of court cases online.  In most older cases (the age of which varies across the country), cases are published in paper-based volumes that you can find in most Canadian law libraries or by using commercial services, most often purchased by lawyers.  The list of cases we provide would enable you to look up the cases at a law library if you gave the librarian the case reference listed on the report.  As our website states, we guarantee the accuracy of the substantive information shown on our report, especially the age, length of service, and notice period.  However, we also state that we cannot provide links to all cases since some of our cases refer to a paper-based copy of a case, not a case available on the web.  As courts upload older cases to the web, we will endeavour to link those cases to our database for our customers.

If we provided our customers with a list of cases that only had linked cases, such a list would be less accurate than the ones we currently produce.  Our calculator identifies those cases with the closest match to your circumstances.  If we were to generate a list that showed ONLY those cases with links, then that would widen the sample size of cases that would be analyzed, thus creating a sample with a greater difference between the minimum and maximum value.  This would diminish the usefulness of our analysis.

For us to include cases published in traditional paper format, we would only have two options: (1) subscribe to those services at a cost that would make our service prohibited to the average Canadian; or, (2) copy those cases in violation of Canadian copyright laws.

As Canadian courts post more of their cases online and we update our database with the latest cases, our customers can expect more and more of their cases to be linked to an online version.

The latest statistics Canada data suggests that Canadian youth and young workers have been hit particularly hard by this recession. From the perspective of wrongful dismissal, young workers are governed by the same rules as those that govern olders workers. Younger workers are entitled to reasonable notice if their employer terminates their job. However, the notice to which they are entitled will tend to be shorter, often…much shorter.

Consider, your average 20 year old fresh out of high school: they are young (and courts tend to give younger workers a shorter entitlement to notice as they are perceved to have more opportunity to find suitable employment). Second, in most cases, they will not have worked for the same employer for more than a number of years, thus reducing the expectation of notice and entitlement. Third, they will often occupy more junior or front line roles; in those circumstances, a court will find that there are more opportunities to find a suitable role. All of these factors will tend to militate in favour of a shorter notice period.

That said, younger workers may want to think carefully before responding to a dismissal by asking for a longer notice period, even if they are entitled to more. Younger workers may find that a very good reference letter from their former employer is worth more than a few extra days or weeks of notice, particularly as they work to develop a reputation in the labour force. Certainly, younger workers should ensure that they receive at least the statutory minimums to which they are entitled under various employment standards statutes. If they think they were treated unfairly, they should consult a service like FiredWithoutCause.com, get a sense of what they should get, but then make a careful decision about whether a response is good for their long term career.

There’s been a just a ton of news about employment statistics in Canada lately. Some interesting ones that we have come across include:

http://layofftracker.blogspot.com/2009/07/bell-helicopter-layoffs-150-workers-in.html

and from Canada.com:

http://www2.canada.com/windsorstar/news/editorial/story.html?id=d85325d6-cdd6-41fc-aab5-5923d98da3ce

We’ve received interest from a number of small to medium sized businesses who have asked us whether we can help them. You’ve seen in our earlier post that we can. We are also developing an employer-oriented offering that helps employers understand their rights and obligations when they want or need to dismiss an employee and want to do the right thing by treating them fairly. Until we finish that offering, employers can contact us to purchase bulk access to our Severance Package Calculator: info@firedwithoutcause.com. The legal information on our site remains valid for employers and the Severance Package Calculator provides objective assessments of past cases which apply whether you are an employee or an employer.