Here’s a question that we often get from potential customers:
“If I buy your Severance Package calculator at 39.99 and then later on I wish to use your Customized Counter-Offer Letters package, do I have to pay the full 59.98 or do I pay only the 20.00 difference?”
You only need to pay the $20.00 difference. Just sign in as a Returning Customer by entering the username and password with which you originally registered with us. You can just upgrade your purchase by selecting the Template Counter-Offer Letter and our system will remember you as a returning customer and simply charge you the difference.
Similarly, if you were someone who downloaded our free Negotiation Manual, you can upgrade your account and buy access to our Severance Package Calculator or our Full Package using the same method.
The Lawyers’ Weekly Magazine, one of Canada’s most widely distributed legal publications for lawyers, featured FiredWithoutCause.com in its most recent article on employment law. We’re very pleased to be seen as a complementary service to traditional legal services delivered by lawyers rather than as competitors to lawyers. For those individuals who simply cannot afford a lawyer or for those people who just want to know their basic rights before consulting a lawyer, the article, I think, fairly presents us as a low cost solution for those situations.
To read the articl
Next week, we’re back after our Christmas break with some more information on employment law.
We ask the online community for advice about our offering. As you know, we here at FWC are pretty rigorous about protecting our customers’ privacy. We believe that at a time when people feel vulnerable enough, the last thing they want to worry about is their privacy online. So, we don’t require people to enter information like monthly salary or any information that would link them to an employer.
Several of our customers have suggested that we should include a function in our service where we are able to calculate a potential severance package based on dollar amounts rather than according to the length of service. This is easy enough for us to do. However, to incorporate this function, we would need to ask for salary information, information which we had originally thought people would not want to share with us. We wanted to reassure customers up front that we would protect their privacy. One of the ways that we do that is by not even asking for or requiring that information.
It’s easy enough for us not to make this function mandatory. We can design our system so that this information is not mandatory. If the customer does not provide us with that information, then we can design the system so that it bypasses that function.
However, the issue that we are wrestling with is this: will we turn off customers by even asking for that information, even if we tell people upfront that the information is not mandatory and disclose how we will use that information? The last thing we want to do is scare off customers before they complete the buying process, especially if the core information we provide does not require us to know monthly salary information.
BenefitsCanada, a service aimed at HR professionals who generally work for employers mentioned us in their online news: http://www.benefitscanada.com/news/article.jsp?content=20090710_133814_8348. We couldn’t help but to notice their lead-in “HR legal staff be advised: a new online service is available for laid-off or fired Canadians to seek better serverance packages.”
Be advised? Surely, employers wouldn’t be deliberately low-balling employees from what is a fair severance? Beware the employee who knows what their rights are!
Actually, all fun aside - we’ve gotten lots of questions from small to medium size business owners who ask us whether they can use the site. We say: ABSOLUTELY! While the language we use is geared more to the employee, small to medium sized business owners can engage with our site to understand basic law around wrongful dismissal and use our calculator to get a sense of what might be a fair severance range for the employee that would minimize their risk of potential litigation. Business owners can then make their own decision about how to conduct their severance negotiation strategy - and our Negotiation Manual can help them do it.
You can now follow us on Twitter: @FWCadvisor. At FiredWithoutCause.com, we wanted to be able to use our Twitter and Facebook pages as dynamic forums to help customers and the online community. With a dedicated Twitter and Facebook page, along with this blog and our e-mail contacts, we will be better able to answer questions and resolve issues and make that information known to the community.
Being a fledging entrepreneur is never easy. So much to do! After much prodding from you, we’ve finally got around to setting up our Facebook pages with lots apologies for taking so long. We’re using Facebook, LinkedIn, and this blog to get feedback from you. We actually look forward to answering frequently asked questions about this site, our service, or general aspects of employment law on these social networking sites. We want to get all of your feedback, even bug reports. We’d rather have these bugs shared publicly on our Facebook page so that we can fix them and tell everyone we’ve fixed them. We think www.FiredWithoutCause.com will improve faster with public feedback. Check us out at Facebook.
I wanted to thank everyone who has participated in our “soft launch”. You’ve given us tons of fantastic feedback and we are busy incorporating all of your suggestions and observations. We’ve finished our quality assurance checks, tweaked our interfaces, and improved our social networking and sharing capabilities. Thanks to you, we’ve:
fixed issues where some of our data fields got gummed up when you entered too much information;
totally simplified our analysis report, made it much less statistics heavy;
made a report sample available for people BEFORE they pay for one;
introduced social bookmarking features throughout the site;
made our Employment Law online handbook into a shareable .pdf
In time for our media launch, we’ve also tripled the number of cases in our database. Our search results are now more targeted than ever. We’ll be adding to our database, going forwards and backwards in time, to add relevant cases.
Understanding what a service can do is sometimes confusing. We created a little video that will help explain our services better. Its been posted to YouTube and can be viewed below.
We are thrilled to launch this unique legal information service in Canada to help people who have lost their jobs. Whether you call it getting fired, laid off, dismissed, or let go – we empower Canadians who have lost their jobs by sharing with them important information about their legal entitlements and obligations.
My name is Chilwin Cheng, one of the co-founders of FiredWithoutCause.com. In this first blog post, I’d like to introduce myself and tell you a bit about the company.
I am a practicing lawyer in the City of Vancouver, Province of British Columbia, Canada. For many years, I’ve practiced as a litigator, helping people resolve disputes with others – whether that meant helping them negotiate a solution or helping them through arbitration or a court. I’ve seen my fair share of wrongful dismissal disputes, helping both employees and employers.
It’s tough to see friends and family lose their jobs in this current economic downturn. With the high cost of legal advice and services, I saw this as a unique and innovative way to help Canadians gain affordable access to information about their legal rights.
So, with that dream in mind, I teamed up with my co-founder Jim Hamlin to create Paradigm Shift Solutions Inc. We were both MBA students at Simon Fraser University’s Executive MBA programs and study team members for two years. Combining my employment law experience and Jim’s software experience, we created Canada’s first innovative, direct-to-consumer web-enabled commercial legal information service.
We decided to tackle the issue of delivering wrongful dismissal information to people as our first product. Why did we choose wrongful dismissal as our first area?
Three reasons:
Almost everyone has been fired, let go, or dismissed at some time in his or her working life. This traumatic event touches everyone.
In my experience, it’s an event where people can really benefit from even a little bit of information about their legal entitlements.
While it’s an area of the law where people could benefit the most from some help, the need comes at a time when many people feel least able to afford legal services.
At a time when many people feel least able to afford to hire a lawyer, FiredWithoutCause.com helps people understand their situation and make informed choices. We talk about the employment contract, severance periods, and basic negotiation. We provide:
a simple, plain-English tutorial on employment law, contracts, and severance periods and payments
a manual on how to develop and present your counter-offer
access to a database, assembled by lawyers and paralegals, containing thousands of cases on wrongful dismissal from across Canada
template counter-offer letters, drafted by employment lawyers
We’ll use this blog as a way of sharing information about employment law and wrongful dismissal. In our next post, I’ll talk about how employment law works and why Canadians even get termination packages.
We’re excited about this service. We’d love to hear from you about topics you’d like more information on and we’ll include them in our next blog posts.
