Hi, my name is Alex Granovsky and I’m the managing member of Granovsky & Sundaresh. We’re an employment law firm in New York City and we specialize in severance agreements.
A question I get asked a lot is what to expect when negotiating a severance agreement in New York City. I’m going to try to break that down in this video here.
If you’re negotiating on your own, this is really what you should expect: First of all, push back. If you’re going to negotiate your severance agreement, you can expect your former employer to open with:
“No, we’re not giving you more money.”
“You’re not going to get it.”
“We can’t do it.”
“We won’t do it.”
Don’t expect them to immediately say, “Yes, you’re right. We’re sorry, here’s more severance.” Expect push back; be prepared for it.
Number two, expect negative feedback. Your employer may end up having to justify terminating you. In so doing, they may call back performance to efficiencies or other issues that you’ve had over the course of your employment. That’s not fun to hear. You need to gird yourself for it and be prepared accordingly.
Third and finally, a lot of employers do is pull a power play. Either they give you time limits or they say, “No, we can’t possibly change the severance because of company policy” or whatever. These are power plays. Time limits are power plays. If they want you to sign the severance, they can have you do it next month if they want.
Similarly, while many companies do have severance policies (whereby they give an employee only x amount), that’s not the law. That’s not written in stone.
Companies can and often do change the amount of severance that they give to employees it’s your job to give them a good reason.
If you want our help in finding a good reason, we would be happy to talk and see whether we could do that.
Like I said at the beginning ,we’re a law firm that specializes in New York City severance agreements. If there’s anything we can do to help, feel free to call. Thanks for watching. Take care.