Boost Compliance: eSignature Lawfulness for Company Bonus Letter in United States

How to eSign a document: eSignature lawfulness for Company Bonus Letter in United States

hi my name is robert shelley with shelley law and my law firm assists professionals with employment contract issues today i'm going to talk about is an offer letter a contract in short most likely it is not so when a professional is entertaining a new position many of the employers will offer an offer letter also known as the letter of intent and then in that letter it will kind of break down the basics of the employment relationship so it'll list compensation potential bonus structure probably the term of the agreement how long it lasts maybe a few of the benefits if there are a non-compete and non-solicit if professional liability insurance is needed maybe who pays for tail so just kind of like basic bullet points of these are the things that you know are going to be incorporated into the employment contract now it does make sense to negotiate the main terms of the agreement prior to signing an offer letter it's kind of bad form to agree to a salary get the offer letter and then continue to negotiate after you've already negotiated however there are many times where you'll agree to an offer letter and then the employer will follow up with an employment agreement and then the terms of the employment agreement are maybe much different than you were expecting maybe the specific language of the non-compete was much more restrictive than you were anticipating or let's you know maybe if you're paid purely on collections the collections ends as soon as the contract is terminated and then you just missed out on you know 60 to 90 days of uh collections that you should get a percentage of so uh once you sign the offer letter the question is is it a binding contract and the short answer is no it's not unless there's specific language in the offer letter that states this is binding in some way which would be extraordinarily rare um it just it's just not done maybe in like academia when the it's more of a kind of a thorough offer letter and that's all that they're providing and then they're just referring out to a bunch of policies and procedures but if it's just a normal professional environment then no the offer letter will generally just be a general these are the terms that we've agreed upon however the professional can continue to negotiate even if they've signed an offer letter and even in regards to the terms that they've already agreed to the employer most likely will not be happy if you come back at them and and ask them to renegotiate terms but if you're going to do that you need to explain why you're doing it meaning yes this salary at 250 000 annually made sense but you're also giving me a three-year non-compete that covers five counties which is going to effectively make me move if i uh you know once a agreement terminates and taking that into account 250 is not worth me taking this job so giving the employer some kind of context as far as why you did agree to some kind of compensation at one point but now at this point it's no longer an amount that you're willing to work for is important and i think most smart employers will understand that nothing is final until you sign the actual employment agreement so even though you've agreed to terms in the offer letter it doesn't mean that you can't reopen those but you got to keep in mind that it may tick off the employer in some way now what about terms that aren't listed in the offer letter but are listed in the employment agreement those are absolutely terms that you should try to negotiate and when i say negotiate you know what do you do well if you have a signing bonus ask for a little more if you ever not compete try to reduce the amount of time of the non-compete try to reduce the geographic restriction if they're not going to pay for professional liability insurance or tail insurance after the contract ends then try to work out some kind of agreement where they'll pay for all of it or maybe a portion of it um as i stated before if there's some kind of bonuses involved you want to make certain if you've earned those bonuses that you want to get them paid even if you're not employed at the time that they're normally paid out maybe get them prorated if there's some kind of forgiveness structure so a lot of uh employees will get some kind of signing bonus and then in the contract it'll state if they leave before this period of time they'll have to repay back a portion of it um if you have like annual forgiveness then get that reduced to either quarterly or monthly forgiveness so just to be specific if you have a two-year term in the agreement and you were given twenty thousand dollar signing bonus it may state for each year you're here it's forgiven one half well it's better for the employee to get that reduced to a monthly because if you leave in the middle of the year and it's yearly forgiveness you missed out on six months of forgiveness whereas if it's monthly you just you know have six of 12 months forgiven so there's plenty that you can negotiate even from when you've signed an offer letter to a contract in general it is not binding and you can always renegotiate terms now once you sign the employment agreement then yes those terms are final and you'll have to stand by whatever you agree to but as far as the offer letter goes it's still negotiable for the most part uh if you have any questions you can always call my law firm at the phone number listed below in the description or you can reach us to our website shelleylaw.com that's chelelaw.com and i appreciate your watch video thanks [Music] you