First off, my thanks to 71lbs.net blog for letting me share what nearly ended up being unfair dismissal story with my former employer.
Back in 2011 I ran into issues with my then employer whose name I’m not going to mention here as I signed a confidentiality agreement and I found myself having to look for employment lawyers located in Sydney Australia as this is where I lived at the time. First of all, this post deals with the ways I chose employment solicitors to represent me however it took me abut 6 months back and forth of negotiations with the company to try and prevent having to hire legal representation or worse – loose the job.
While I was talking to my company whilst employed, I stared the search for workplace lawyers just in case the resolution was not achieved and I needed to hire solicitors on short notice. And what do you know, that’s exactly how it happened so being proactive about it paid off in the end, read on to find out what happened!
I truly believe I was being fair and reasonable when I questioned my employment contract and did not turn around over night and said something like “I will not do this or that any more because it is not something I agreed on..” instead I offered to help, make changes that will address the issues. Turned out that during that period they knew all along they weren’t going to agree to any changes, instead they just dragged their feet and hoped that I’d leave on my own accord. Seeing that I’d spend over 7 years with the company and would be leaving lots of chips on the table if I had just left, I thought I’d look into it, try and help – wasn’t to be, straight to employment legal experts it was!
Oh and it happened over night – literally! When the company including their human resource and legal departments finally and officially got back to me with basically – ‘you are in the wrong and we are in the right’ despite the fact that in my mind and according to my research workplace law of Australia was on my side I had no choice but to engage Sydney employment lawyers McArdle Legal I had already chosen using my method explained below; you will find out why my selection process was unorthodox.
After looking up unfair dismissal solicitors in the search engine the results showed up however I found out that most of the first page results were either the paid for or the law firms did not only do workplace law but dealt with pretty much all other areas of legal profession. So I decided to find a law firm that only dealt with workplace dispute resolution cases and decided to head over to the White Pages directory book http://www.whitepages.com.au/. It seemed at the time that the only way to find workplace specialists was to look it up manually and not do it online – I mentioned it would be an unusual way of looking up a service business to hire.