Retaliation Defense Lawyer in Seattle for Business Owners

Understanding Workplace Rights and Retaliation Laws

If you are a business owner, you must perform a variety of responsibilities to ensure the success of your company. A significant portion of that responsibility is treating your employees equitably and lawfully. If you aren’t careful, a disgruntled or harmed employee could take you to court. You must be particularly aware of retaliation laws in order to avoid a potentially devastating lawsuit.

Retaliation is the action an employer takes against an employee in response to the employee engaging in protected activities under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

These protected activities include:

• Engaging in an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint, investigation, or lawsuit
• Requesting accommodations for a disability or religion
• Asking others about their salaries
• Bringing up discrimination or harassment
• Resisting discrimination or harassment

Retaliation could include a wide variety of actions that serve as a form of punishment for the employee’s lawful actions.

An employee might claim you retaliated against them if, after the protected activity, you allegedly:

• Increased scrutiny or gave them harsher evaluations
• Reprimanded or verbally abused them
• Demoted them
• Threatened them with calling authorities
• Created a more hostile work environment for them

If an employer retaliates against an employee, the employee may make a claim for retaliation that is separate from an underlying claim for discrimination or harassment.

How Our Seattle Team Can Assist You

At NWBizLaw, we have years of experience protecting business owners from unfair or false accusations. If you’ve been accused of retaliating against your employee, we want to stand by your side and protect both your rights and your reputation.

Request a consultation with our retaliation defense attorney in Seattle by calling (206) 565-0090 today.

Strategies for Preventing Retaliation

Although you can’t necessarily control the way you feel about a harassment or discrimination case, you can control your subsequent behavior in relation to the accuser. If you are a key person involved in the dispute, then you should no longer exert judgments on the employee involved. That duty can be handed over to another administrator in order to proactively avoid an accusation of retaliation. If this precaution is written into your operational structure, there will be systems in place to keep you from further damaging your personal reputation as well as the reputation of your company.

Defending Against Retaliation Claims

When discussing your case with our lead attorney, it’s important to be clear about your motives for the actions your accuser considers retaliatory. If you used sound business judgment to make decisions and carry out your business, then their retaliation claim may not hold up in court. There are other ways to expose a fraudulent retaliation claim, and our business litigation attorney will know which defense to take for your particular case.

The sooner you begin building your defense, the easier it will be to obtain a favorable outcome. Call us today at (206) 565-0090.