Welcome to Episode 1 of the New York State Employment Law show.  The purpose of this show is to bring you information about employment law and employment questions that you might have in the state of New York.

Our goal here is to give you some education to help you through what's probably a difficult time and to answer some questions that you might have.

The first question, that we're going to deal with today, is the question of when it is that you should reach out to an attorney, and if you decided to hire an attorney, how you should go about doing finding a good one .

Now, if you find that you're looking online, trying to find a lot of information, doing a lot of googling and looking at a lot of so-called experts online, you're probably in a position where it will make sense for you to reach out to an attorney.

There are a lot of people online who are providing information. Most of those people, if not all of them, don't know anything about your situation. Don't know anything about what you're going thru and frankly, many of them are not lawyers. That's important because employment legal issues are complicated. The law is technical, and it is very fact specific. So, if you find yourself looking for answers about very specific questions to you, to your situation, such as: "How do you handle sexual harassment at work?" "What do you do if the employer is treating you differently after a medical leave?"; questions like that, you're going to want to reach out to an attorney because you are going to want to talk about the specifics of your circumstances and get an answer based upon those specifics. Get a guiding approach, thoughts about how to handle your situation specifically moving forward. There are often several different options depending upon your circumstances, so it's important that you speak with someone who has significant experience in the area.

So, if you have decided that you're going to hire a lawyer, how do you find one?

There are a number of different ways. You can ask your trusted colleagues, you can ask your friends, you can look online. If you look online, our suggestion is that you look for people who do this kind of work often. Who have handled the kinds of cases that deal with situations similar to yours, who have written about these issues.  Who have satisfied clients in this area. The legal profession is becoming more and more practice specific, and you have to remember that you cannot be everything to everyone.  So it may be in your interest to work with an attorney who has dealt with these issues before and had some familiarity with the topic.

Hopefully you've found this information helpful. If you have questions about an employment law issue, please feel free to fill out the contact form on this page. We're happy to look over your situation and see if we can help.