A few weeks ago, I was told I’d be able to sue my former employer, the Chicago Public Schools.
The company I had worked for for for the last nine years, I thought, was going to be my one and only opportunity to win a lawsuit.
The lawsuit was a bad idea, and the legal fees would have been astronomical.
Instead, I found a lawyer who was friendly and courteous.
He quickly explained to me that he was a big fan of the city’s Public Schools, and that he’d been working with them for the past several years to change how they treat employees who had been fired or were otherwise disciplined.
As a result, the city was giving me $6,000 as a lump sum payment for my legal fees, and my only chance to win.
That was my first legal victory, but I had no idea how much it would help me when it came time to file for unemployment benefits, which are due on January 17.
And the amount I had won was a drop in the bucket compared to what I’d lose in legal fees and a big chunk of my wages.
I’ve been unemployed for nearly a year, but my case was only just starting to take shape when I got a call from my attorney telling me to meet with him at a local Starbucks.
A few months ago, when I was looking for a new job, I had applied to more than 20 companies, but they all asked me to fill out the same form: Would you like to be paid by the hour?
If you’re under 18, you can’t be paid more than $20 an hour.
The first person I called was a lawyer I had met in high school who’d been a friend of mine for nearly 20 years.
We talked about what I was facing, and he advised me to check with his firm, Hire Lawyer, to see if they were able to represent me.
“You can do that, but we’d like to talk to you first,” he said.
I was so excited to meet this lawyer, I asked him how many other lawyers I could contact in the area.
“No problem,” he responded.
“Just call me back in a week or two.”
And then I called back and spoke with him.
Hire Lawyers was a small firm with a client roster of more than 300 people.
We had never had any trouble with an application.
In fact, the only problems I had with Hire were with the paperwork.
I didn’t want to waste my time on the application process, so I was happy to send it in.
I called them the next day and asked for a list of all of my questions.
“It’s a little complicated,” I said.
“This is what it looks like: How many hours do you offer?”
I asked, and they answered quickly, “We’re not an hourly-hour company, but you have to ask.”
I asked them what I needed to do.
They told me that I had to fill a form out with my last name, address, and a date and time.
I also needed to write down the amount of money I wanted, and their advice was to write it down as soon as possible.
The last thing I needed was to be in the dark.
After a few days of back and forth, I finally sent in my application, and within a week, the company sent me an invoice.
They charged me $2,500, and I paid it in installments.
A week later, I got an email from my lawyer thanking me for my hard work.
I’d lost $7,500 on a bad decision.
I thought the process was easy.
But when I received the $6K check, I wondered if they had been lying to me.
They’d only charged me the correct amount of $6.50 an hour, which is more than double the amount they were actually charging me.
I knew they were lying to save me the extra $6k.
The $6 I’d received from Hire was the difference between my total compensation for the previous year, which included all of the money I had paid my former boss, and what I would be paid in the upcoming year.
And I still had $1,800 left over from my previous year’s paycheck.
That meant I owed about $2.5 million.
After going to a public school, I worked in the school cafeteria.
This is the type of job that is most difficult to get, and this is the sort of thing that can make you think you’re a winner.
I had a hard time explaining what had happened to me, but the truth was, I’d been fired because of a bad review by an employee.
I couldn’t find my former coworker who’d actually called me, and she was also nowhere to be found.
So I had my attorney contact the school district to ask them to let me get a new employee, but that person had already been