Posts Tagged ‘Wisconsin’

If you are an employee with concerns about your employer, or you think you may pursue a legal action someday, please know that the documentation you keep is critical.  Do not assume the employer or others will keep important documents and give them to you later.  Also, don’t assume the employer will agree with your recollections of events– if you keep a journal with details (who, what, when, etc.), that documentation will make your position more credible.

More about documentation…

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Does Wisconsin and the U.S. generally need “tort reform?”  Are too many (or an increasing number) of lawsuits being filed, with too many plaintiffs receiving large awards, and too many businesses suffering due to law suits by individuals?

As a plaintiff’s employment attorney, I have shared my own observations and biases in trying to answer questions  like these.  See, for example, my blog posts “Biggest Risk to Employers? Frivolous Suits? No. The (Expensive) Certainty of Being “Right” and “Corporate Rhetoric, the Decline of Individual Rights, and What You Can Do About It.”

My views aside, the best answers to the questions above are non-biased and objective answers, grounded in statistics and facts.  While it is my opinion no one can give answers that are purely objective and non-biased, folks interested in the questions above should check out this resource, which is much more objective than my blog posts: “Civil Justice in Wisconsin: A Fact Book, with Commentary” by Marc Galanter and Susan Steingass, of The University of Wisconsin Law School.

(I heard of this fact book via the excellent blog by Jon Groth, a Wisconsin personal injury attorney).

I’ll quote the Fact book’s conclusion below, which is a summary of some important information covered, although you should read the full fact book (a 23-page Adobe document) for detailed and statistical information that addresses questions like those above.  The full fact book is here.

“Conclusion

In many ways, Wisconsin is very much like its neighbors and like the rest of the nation. Overall, resort to the courts is increasing, but most of this increase is in the family and contract areas. Tort filings are decreasing relative to population and in absolute numbers. The portion of cases that reach trial, especially jury trial, is decreasing. When cases do get to trial, median awards are mostly lower than in the recent past.

If we look further to see how Wisconsin is distinctive, we find that even with the limitations of the data, Wisconsin has a modest amount of
litigation in comparison with our neighbors and the rest of the nation. Most non-family civil cases are filed by businesses against individual defendants; where individuals sue businesses, the awards are comparatively modest.

This relatively low resort to the courts is reflected in a lawyer population that is relatively small and slow growing. The costs imposed by the civil justice system are palpable; the benefits that it confers are less apparent – indeed to the extent that they are effective, they fade from view. The same system of justice that protects citizens, protects and facilitates businesses. Businesses use the civil justice system to enforce contracts and collect debts. The security of property rights afforded by the civil law enables them to raise capital, borrow, and extend credit. They enjoy the protections of the tort system in deterring injurious behavior by others. All of this is so routine that it easily escapes our attention. This should remind us that citizens and businesses have a shared interest in an effective civil justice system. We hope that this booklet helps provide the basis for an informed public discussion.”

When I was in law school, a professor discussed an interesting analogy.  It involved the invention of cloverleaf-shaped on-ramps.  The new on-ramps were self-imposed structures, which- like the self-imposition of new laws- improved safety and prevented us from making human errors.

Prior to the cloverleaf on-ramp, people merged on to a busy highway the same way as they did any old road.  To drive onto the highway, drivers had to look left and right, and use their own discretion.  During the thousands of repeated uses of this discretion, people inevitably made mistakes, and serious accidents inevitably occurred.

The cloverleaf on-ramp removed much of the error-prone discretion from the drivers.  With the cloverleaf ramp, drivers no longer had the choices as to when to look left and right, and when and how to enter the highway.  Now, drivers just drive on the cloverleaf ramp, which routes them (with no discretion to choose a different route) onto the highway in a safe manner.

New laws, my professor noted, often serve similar purposes.  We enact laws- like we construct a cloverleaf on-ramp- to save us from our own mistakes and bad tendencies.  To save us from ourselves.  Note this is a self-imposed removal of choice- not a non-consensual replacement of our personal choices and liberties.  A self-imposed replacement of our own error-prone maneuvers with a structure that we know to do the function at hand better than our manual maneuvers can.

Whoever first envisioned the cloverleaf on-ramp clearly understood that human error is an inevitable part of human nature, and that it is important to establish structures (or laws) to save us from our own known deficiencies.

In this day and age, I fear that most people are too busy being self-righteous when we should be busily identifying our many limitations and self-deficiencies, and constructing clover-leaf laws and regulations accordingly.

DISCLAIMER: The information in this blog is NOT legal advice, nor does it establish an attorney-client relationship between you and Employee Rights Attorney Michael Brown or the law firm of Peterson, Berk & Cross. Legal advice often varies between situations. If you want legal advice for your specific circumstances, you must consult with an attorney.

If you have an important document relating to a dispute with your employer- for example, a termination letter or a pay stub showing underpaid wages- please save that document.  (You can read a more detailed post here about all the types of good documentation, and how to preserve it).

Sounds simple, right?  But it’s easy to inadvertently misplace or throw away documents that could be used at a (much later) time after a legal proceeding has started.  So put all important documents in a safe place.

Just as important, please do not write on the documents you save, or otherwise alter them.

Always keep in mind that important employment documents may later be used in legal proceedings. For example, if you want to use your termination letter as an exhibit at an unemployment hearing, you don’t want to show the judge a letter that has your added, handwritten notes across it, saying things like “This is a LIE!!!!” (I only exaggerate slightly- I’ve had clients who marked up documents with notes reflecting their frustrations in similar terms).

Bottom line: hold on to important documents, and don’t mess with them.

DISCLAIMER: The information in this blog is NOT legal advice, nor does it establish an attorney-client relationship between you and Employee Rights Attorney Michael Brown or the law firm of Peterson, Berk & Cross. Legal advice often varies between situations. If you want legal advice for your specific circumstances, you must consult with an attorney.

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