So you want to be an employment lawyer? After almost 35 years of handling employment litigation and counselling, with some bumps along the way, I thought I would put pen to paper (do we do that anymore?), and pass along what I hope are some useful tips on how to be a good employment attorney.

Be Inquisitive

All litigators, and especially those who handle employment cases, first and foremost need to be inquisitive. Since discrimination claims often involve state of mind—for example, was it the plaintiff's age or job performance that caused the supervisor to recommend termination—both the plaintiff's attorney and defense counsel need to ask a lot of questions not only about the supervisor but also about others in the chain-of-command who might shed light on the issue.

Similarly, if a company's alleged legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for a termination is financial, you need to ask whether the CEO received a raise while the company was down-sizing? Was the company hiring employees into other positions? Did the company recently move to larger premises? I'll never forget one of my first age discrimination cases as a young lawyer in which a company claimed poor job performance as the reason for firing its human resources director in charge of its New Jersey facility. When the company refused to produce the executive for deposition here in New Jersey, I traveled to Massachusetts. On the way, it dawned on me to ask how compliant that location was with the EEO laws being administered by a younger HR Manager who had not been terminated. I obviously hit a raw nerve because the case quickly settled thereafter for a significant sum.