Oakland Employment Lawyer

If you are visiting this website, you may be facing some difficult decisions. Perhaps you have been wrongfully terminated and you were not provided your final paycheck. Perhaps that final check did not include vacation time or overtime you worked hard to earn. Maybe you were treated unfairly due to a disability or medical condition which your employer does not understand, or worse, your employer refused to listen to you or your doctors. Perhaps you are a leader within a small business dealing with challenging employment law issues. Whatever the case might be, we can help you navigate through your options with confidence.

Discrimination

California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act protect employees from discrimination. Common types of discrimination include but are not limited to discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, medical condition, and disability. Disability discrimination is the most common type of discrimination. Gender and race discrimination are also, unfortunately, all too common.

It is important to contact an attorney as soon as possible after a negative employment event because there are time limitations, called statutes of limitations, that may prevent you from filing a claim if it is not done promptly. Additionally, it is always important to obtain and preserve evidence before it goes missing. Witnesses to discrimination move and change jobs. Video surveillance, for example, is often overwritten if it is not requested on a timely basis. Call us for a free consultation to see if what you are going through is illegal under California employment laws. If you are in Oakland and have suffered a wrongful termination due to race or any other protected trait, trust us to get you the compensation you deserve.

Retaliation

Retaliation is a type of discrimination. There are a handful of employment laws in California that Bay Area employees can use to hold their employers accountable for retaliation. Our favorite retaliation laws are the Fair Employment & Housing Act (California Government Code section 12900 through section 12996) and the Whistleblower Protection Act (California Labor Code section 1102.5).

Retaliation often occurs after someone reports what they reasonably believe to be illegal conduct. Sometimes it happens after someone participates in a divisive process, such as providing witness testimony in a sexual harassment allegation. Finally, one can be retaliated against for refusing to participate in a process or do something that they reasonably believe is illegal. Trust us to lead you through your options and either stop the retaliation, and/or obtain damages for past acts that led to lost wages, lost benefits, and emotional distress. If the acts are intentional, reckless and/or malicious, we may be able to get compensation for punitive damages to send a message and right wrongs against community norms.

Wage and Hour Violations

California employment laws protect your right to be paid for every hour you work, including overtime and double time if appropriate. You also have a right to clear, written wage statements detailing your tax liability, sick days, and vacation days used, among other details. Do you use your personal cell phone, internet or car for work? Do you buy gas to go to meetings, purchase wood to build homes, or pay for plane tickets to attend sales meetings? You have a right to have your expenses reimbursed in a timely manner pursuant to California Labor section 2802.

If you resign, you are entitled to get your last paycheck within 72 hours. If you are terminated, you have a right to receive your final paycheck, including earned vacation days and reasonable expenses, within 24 hours of termination. we can help you assess whether your missing wages should be sought using the Labor Commissioner’s help, or whether the courts are your best option. Call now before a statute of limitations blocks your ability to do so, or critical evidence goes missing. If you are an employer, “evidence-gathering” or “gathering evidence can be daunting and technical. Call our Oakland employment attorney to guide you through the critical first steps to resolve the matter once and for all.

Severance Agreements

We assist employees with reviewing proposed severance agreements. We also counsel employers on how best to use severance agreements to achieve their goals. It is often important to get an outside perspective before signing or drafting a severance agreement. For example, if you are an employee, you do not want to leave money on the table, particularly if you have leverage to get more under California employment laws. If you are an employer, you might want to talk to us before you deliver an invalid severance agreement that violates California’s general rule against non-compete clauses. When you hire Spencer Young Law, PC, you will be able to rest easy that you got what you deserved and protected your business interests.

Civil Rights

Your civil rights are often at issue in a personal injury case when the person or entity causing the harm is a governmental entity or contractor. Your civil rights are often at issue in an employment law case when your religion, disability, age, national origin, medical condition, sexual orientation, and/or gender are involved. We pride ourselves on protecting your fundamental personal right to be free of mistreatment on any protected basis. We take cases against the largest corporations and government entities throughout California. We also assist employers and small businesses in defending civil rights violation allegations.

When you go to work, you expect to be judged and evaluated based on your performance, not on the color of your skin, gender, age, sexual orientation, national origin, religion (including the way you dress, or the leave you need to observe religious holidays), medical condition, or disability. Sometimes things happen at work related to these and other protected characteristics and you must object to what you reasonably believe is illegal activity.

Unfortunately, many employers’ knee jerk reaction is to transfer you, reduce your pay, reduce your benefits, take away your hours, reduce your responsibility, or even terminate you. Under California employment laws, these are commonly referred to as “adverse actions”. We are ready to help you hold your employer accountable and recover damages for adverse actions. In many situations, we can help improve your working conditions without taking formal legal actions. Most of the time, we can resolve your case without going through the risky and time-consuming process of a public trial.

Personal Injury

We have helped hundreds of accident victims in the same way. If you have been hit by a car as a pedestrian, hit by car on a bike, hit by a car while on a motorcycle, rear ended by another car while driving, t-boned by a vehicle in an intersection, injured on someone else’s property due to an unsafe condition, or suffered the effects of negligent truck driving, we can help. We have also had great success assisting victims of dog bites, sexual assault, sexual abuse, and wrongful death occurrences.

Unfortunately, bad things happen to good people every day. Contrary to common, public opinion, less than ten percent (10%) of people injured (at work or elsewhere) file a lawsuit. It takes courage to hold the proper people accountable, particularly if the party responsible is a large corporation or government entity. Even if the harm is caused by mistake, you may still have recourse. You deserve to at least know your options. If you are in Oakland or San Francisco and need a skilled personal injury attorney, consider calling us for a free consultation before time runs out. In some circumstances, an injured party or their family needs to report negligence or intentional harmful acts within months of the occurrence.

Please do not sleep on your rights. We have seen too many people lose valuable opportunities because they did not pick up a phone right after the accident or harmful event. Additionally, there is often evidence of wrongdoing, such as video surveillance footage or wreckage (e.g. glass, metal) on the ground, that may get moved or disappear over time. We have trusted experts that can obtain critical evidence and reconstruct accident scenes so that your story can be told to a jury years later. We use data collection, science and our passion for righting injustice to make past bad news relevant and compelling so you get the compensation you deserve. We recommend you take pictures of the scene and yourself if appropriate then call us to get our experts mobilized to “capture the moment” in time.

Why Choose Us & What Sets Us Apart From Our Competitors?

Clear, prompt and frequent communication sets us apart from other employment law firms in Oakland and the greater Bay Area. The most common complaint against lawyers is that they do not answer the phone or keep their clients updated on their case. Our 24-hour call back guarantee for existing clients means you will always know the status of your case, and you will always be able to talk to a real human being about what is going to happen next.

Another factor that separates us from other law firms in Alameda County is that we represent employees and employers, not just one or the other. Our Oakland employment lawyer has found that working “both sides of the aisle” gives him a wider view of problems which leads to faster, better solutions. We also find that working only one side of cases, over time, can lead to too much ego identification with the mission. In other words, a “crusader mindset” (e.g. these people are always wrong and those people are always right) creeps in, and can prevent the attorneys from seeing other points of view which may be essential to fair resolution. We help employees and employers because they both need us, and they both have legitimate problems worthy of a voice and mutual respect.

Contact Us Today for a Free Consultation

Let us listen, learn, lead and win for you. Push the “Call Now” box for a FREE consultation. You will be glad you did.

We pay referral fees in accordance with California State Bar rules. If you are an attorney in Alameda County doing leg work for a current or potential client, trust us to work tirelessly for the best result while always keeping you as the referring attorney apprised of the current situation and next steps.