Just a month after Twitter’s new CEO, Elon Musk, oversaw large employees layoffs, former Twitter staff have introduced that they’re submitting swimsuit over the corporate’s severance insurance policies. In a press convention with their lawyer Lisa Bloom, former staff Helen-Sage Lee, Adrian Trejo Nuñez, and Amir Shevat alleged that the corporate’s dealing with of their termination constituted a breach of contract, and a violation of California’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act.

It may solely be a handful former staff now, however Twitter may quickly be inundated with related instances and be pressured to pay authorized charges working into hundreds of thousands of {dollars}. Rafael Nendel‑Flores, a California-based employment lawyer, says the authorized technique of submitting a number of arbitration fits, which is probably going a approach to get across the constraints of a dispute decision settlement, will pile strain on Twitter. “Just the arbitration fees alone could be massive,” he says. 

That’s as a result of employers, on this case Twitter, are required to shoulder the price of the arbitration course of. And having a whole bunch or hundreds of instances to cope with all of sudden might be a major monetary and administrative burden for a corporation already scuffling with a large loss in advertiser revenue. Each particular person arbitration case can simply price between $50,000 and $100,000, says Nendel-Flores. “That is, in my view, a significant pressure point—that Ms. Bloom and probably other plaintiffs’ lawyers are going to try and push these individual arbitration cases.”

Like most Twitter staff, Lee and the others had signed away their proper to be a part of a category motion swimsuit after they took the job through a dispute decision settlement that routes all authorized complaints to arbitration. This meant that if they’d an issue with the corporate, every individual must negotiate on their very own. For an employer, such a authorized mechanism blocks large class motion fits. But for Twitter, confronted with scores of disgruntled former staff, it may result in loss of life by a thousand cuts.

And Bloom’s shoppers aren’t alone. Last week, Akiva Cohen, a lawyer representing one other group of Twitter staff, notified the company that his shoppers, too, can be submitting arbitration fits if the corporate didn’t “unequivocally confirm” that former staff can be given the complete severance they are saying Twitter promised them.

“Nobody really expects to go into a workplace setting, especially a new job that you’re really excited about, thinking you’re going to end up suing your employer one day or your employer is going to treat you in a way that deserves legal action,” says Lee. 

When Musk first introduced the layoffs, one other group of staff filed a preemptive lawsuit in opposition to Twitter for potential violations of the WARN Act, which requires that corporations present staff with 60 days discover of layoffs. In response, Twitter agreed to maintain the fired staff on its payroll as non-working staff till January 4, however the severance for fired staff as but stays unclear. Lee, Nuñez, and Shevat allege that the severance they had been supplied by the corporate after it was bought differed from what they’d been promised earlier than the takeover.