You're Fired !

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As Lisa joined JJ firms as an independent lawyer, there was no such thing as allocation of case sources by partners of the firm. So if she wants to have business, she would have to develop and explore it herself.

Generally, lawyers who specialize in labor disputes, such as Lisa, who have a certain number of years of work experience, actually have some old clients as resources in hand. However, Lisa’s situation was relatively special. She had been practicing in B City for the previous few years. Now she has returned to A City just a short while ago. Her roots were not yet stable, and at the same time, her client selection bias was finally showing its downside —

She had always represented the labour side of the business, and it was difficult to get repeat cases from this side of the business. No matter how well she represented this side, it was impossible to have long-term continuity with individual clients.

If Lisa had paid more attention to restructuring her client portfolio and maintained a few corporate clients alongside her individual ones, she wouldn’t have been in the predicament she was in now—

As long as there was hiring and firing of corporate clients, there would always be labour disputes. Even if the company was in City B, the labor dispute lawyers between the companies will recommend each other. Once the corporate client in City B has a partner company in City A, Lisa will have the opportunity to be recommended to this partner company.

In this way, Lisa would not be short of case sources, which was better than sitting on a cold bench for the time being.

Lisa was bored and browsing through Weibo, when she casually clicked on the hot search. She was accidentally attracted by a topic – #Women announce their pregnancy and start taking leave after one month of probation.#

Lisa has seen a lot of conflicts between female employees and companies over pregnancy and maternity leave in labour dispute cases. However, there was so much discussion on this old topic, and this time it involved a local company, Guifeng Communications, in City A.

Lisa was a bit curious and clicked on the video of the interview that sparked the topic.

The person in front of the camera was a middle-aged woman, a little chubby, wearing a pair of glasses, with a very popular and not very recognisable face, like every ordinary 9 to 5 office worker, and her tone of voice was quite approachable. The subtitles of the video indicated that she was Ms Li, the General Manager of the HR Department of Guifeng Communication.

“We recruited  Kwon Yumi through a headhunter. Because her position was quite important, we interviewed a lot of people, spent a lot of energy screening resumes and asked headhunters to help us with the search before we finally decided to let Yumi join us. Her resume was not really the best of all the applicants, but she was very young and energetic.She specifically stated during the recruitment process that she was unmarried and had no children and had no boyfriend. She was single and had no intention to fall in love and get married in the next two years. Our company has plans to develop new business in the next two years. The work pressure of this position will be relatively high, and we hope to recruit employees with continuity in their work, so this was a plus point for her, and we finally hired her.”

The reporter who was interviewing duly came out to steer the conversation and said, “As a result, one month after joining, this  Yumi, who claimed she had no boyfriend and would not consider getting married and having children in next two year, suddenly announced she was pregnant and then started taking a leave of absence?”

In the camera, Ms. Li nodded, with a look of helplessness, “That’s right, because we are in a hurry to hire people, Yumi only provided a very simple medical examination certificate. There was no such thing as an X-ray or chest X-ray. In addition, she said that the physical examination happened to be during her menstrual period, so the urine test has to be done after a while. We didn’t pay much attention then. She kept dragging it for a while and everytime we asked her for it, she excused herself by claiming that she didn’t have time to do it. We didn’t think much about it. After all, on the one hand, her job in this position was indeed very busy, and it was normal to say that she was not free. Unexpectedly, she waited for the probation period to pass, and suddenly brought the hospital health report and told us that she was pregnant and wanted to take a maternity leave.”