A new year inevitably brings new opportunities. Businesses grow, strategic plans are implemented, and prospects are hopefully converting to clients and customers. You’ve set out goals for 2025, and now you’re firmly putting the plans in place to reach those goals. Unfortunately, the reality as an employer is that it’s often the things that you miss that can become your unexpected expenses. You may think that you still have all of your employment law pieces sorted out from when you started the business. Much like your business, though, the law also grows and changes over time. The contracts...

Employment terminations can be straightforward, or they can be complicated, but they are ultimately something of a chess game. The one move that remains in your control, though, is the exit package. We’ve previously written about times when you may not owe an employee anything, but what about the money that you do owe them, and how should it be paid out to avoid potential litigation and let everyone walk away satisfied? Where Law Meets Contracts The first guide to what you may owe an employee upon termination comes from their employment contract. If you have a written employment contract...

When you start a new job, you’re usually handed an array of paperwork – even digital-first companies still resort to paper for some of these items. They may include a copy of your employment contract that you had signed, information about how to claim employee health benefits, and some opaque-sounding booklet known as an employment manual. While job-specific training may be given one-on-one or in small groups, these employee manuals often apply to the whole company and, at first glance, often sound very generic. Of course, you know not to miss work, not to come into the office in a...

When an employee sues their former employer for wrongful termination, their claim is usually for what is known as ‘common law notice.’ This amount is roughly a judge’s estimation, given that person’s circumstances, of how long it will take them to find comparable new work. Determining this amount is an art, not a science. While there is a common misconception of a ‘1 month per year of service’ rule, that has never been the law. A court will review an employee’s age, how long they were with the employer, the nature of the work they were doing, the current job market, and other factors to...

Employment contracts are a tricky business. We spoke in our recent blog about the importance of employment contracts, and how they’re instrumental in setting out the expectations for both employers and employees in the working relationship. For employers especially, they are meant to provide a sense of formality, and certainty. They can also be minefields.  That’s because employment contracts are different from most other types of contracts. Yes, it is possible to draw up a simple contract between two friends on a bar cocktail napkin and turn it into a legally binding agreement (although...

Constructive dismissal is easily one of the most popular phrases from employment law within the past two decades. It is also one of the most widely misunderstood legal concepts in this field. Far too often, employees will come to see us claiming they have been constructively dismissed and then produce their termination letter, their Record of Employment, and other key documents that indicate this was not in any way constructive dismissal. Dismissal is a common problem for employees – most employees will go through a ‘layoff,’ ‘downsizing,’ or ‘dismissal’ at least once in their careers....