Handed a Severance Agreement? Five Things to Check Before the First Lawyer Meeting

A severance packet lands on a Thursday afternoon, usually in a conference room borrowed for twenty minutes, and it contains three things: a general release of claims, a payment schedule, and a date. If the person being let go is forty or older, federal law attaches a consideration period to that release, twenty-one days for an individual separation and forty-five when a group is going out together, plus seven days after signing in which the signature can be revoked. Those numbers are printed in the document. They are also the single most useful fact a person carries into a first legal meeting, and a surprising number of people arrive without having found them.

1. Locate the clock, and confirm who set it

There are usually two deadlines in play and they are not the same. One is statutory, built into the waiver provisions that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is responsible for enforcing where age discrimination claims are being released, and it cannot be shortened by the employer asking nicely. The other is the date the company wrote in its cover email, which is frequently earlier and is a preference rather than a rule. Knowing which is which changes the first meeting completely, because a person with eighteen days left is asking an attorney to evaluate an offer, while a person who believes they have until Monday is asking for permission to panic.

2. Bring the documents that determine the answer, not the ones that explain the story

The release is not self-contained. What it is worth depends on the offer letter, any equity grant agreement and its vesting schedule, the commission or bonus plan with its language about payment after termination, the prior restrictive covenant signed at hire, and the handbook acknowledgment covering accrued time off. Five or six documents, most of them findable in a personal email account within an hour. Two years of message threads about a difficult manager are not that. They may matter later if a claim is actually filed, but in the first meeting they consume paid time producing sympathy rather than analysis.

3. Price the offer yourself before anyone bills you to do it

Severance is rarely a single number. It is weeks of base pay, plus or minus an unpaid quarterly bonus, plus whatever unvested equity dies at the termination date, plus a payout of accrued vacation that state law may require regardless of the agreement, plus some number of months of subsidized health coverage. Doing that arithmetic in advance, on one page, converts a vague sense of unfairness into a figure that can be compared against something. An attorney can then spend the hour on the terms that move the figure, which is the part requiring judgment, instead of reconstructing a spreadsheet you were better placed to build.

4. Ask who is paying for the advice you are about to receive

Many separation agreements offer to reimburse the departing employee for legal review, commonly up to a stated cap, and sometimes the human resources contact will name a firm that handles these regularly. That arrangement is not improper and the cap is often genuinely useful. It is worth understanding, though, that a firm receiving steady referral volume from one employer has an interest that runs slightly alongside yours rather than exactly with it, and that a cap set at a few hundred dollars buys a review, not a negotiation. Ask the attorney directly whether the company has sent them work before, and whether the fee arrangement covers only reading the document or also making the phone call that changes it.

5. Decide, in writing, what you would sign today

The most productive first meetings begin with a client who can state a position: I will sign this if the non-solicit drops from twelve months to six and the bonus is paid, and otherwise I want to understand what a claim looks like. That sentence gives the attorney a target and gives you a way to evaluate the answer. It also surfaces the question that decides everything downstream, which is what the next stage costs, whether it is billed hourly or on contingency, and what the realistic range of outcomes looks like against that spend.

The preparation is perhaps three hours of work: reading the packet twice, pulling six documents, building one page of numbers, and writing three sentences about what you want. Done in that order, the paid hour that follows produces a decision rather than a set of impressions, and the twenty-one days stop feeling like a countdown and start functioning as what they were designed to be, which is room to think.