Most people facing termination have never negotiated a severance agreement before. Their employer has. That imbalance alone is reason enough to pause before signing anything, but what I recently uncovered makes the case even more plainly.
I’ve spent years negotiating severance agreements on behalf of executives. In the vast majority of those negotiations, the process is cordial and matter-of-fact. Both sides want resolution. Both sides, eventually, reach it. That approach has served my clients well.
But a strategy guide I recently came across, written by a prominent employer-side law firm for its corporate clients, describes a very different kind of negotiation. One that isn’t interested in mutual resolution. One that is deliberately designed to use you against yourself.
What the Playbook Actually Says
The guide is explicit. It identifies the psychological vulnerabilities of terminated executives and instructs employers to treat them as leverage. Here is what it recommends, closely paraphrased:
On your emotional state: Terminated executives “may be angry, emotional, and unable to distinguish between feasible and infeasible demands.” The guidance: use that.
On your uncertainty: Executives “do not know what to ask for.” They fear that asking for too much will get them rejected, and that asking for too little means getting taken advantage of. The guidance: exploit both fears simultaneously.
On deadlines: Keep to your deadline. As it approaches, “raise the executive’s anxiety level.” If they ask for more time, put a price on it.
On your relationships: Apply pressure through people whose “approval the executive wants, or whose disapproval the executive dreads” to get the executive to drop demands.
On your reputation: Remind the executive that pushing back could result in their “deficient performance or unsatisfactory conduct” becoming known to others. Even if it never rose to the level of cause for termination.
On your legal claims: Even if you have a viable legal claim, tell the executive that pursuing it “will be costly to the executive’s reputation, relationships, and respect.”
This is not a description of hardball negotiating. This is a documented strategy for psychological manipulation.
The Asymmetry You’re Up Against
If and when your employer hands you a severance agreement with a 21-day deadline, you are not stepping into an informal conversation. You are stepping into a strategy, one that has been practiced dozens, if not hundreds, of times by attorneys who specialize in exactly this situation.
Meanwhile, you are doing this for the first time. You are unemployed. You may be grieving the loss of a role, a team, or an identity you spent years building. You are operating under a deadline designed to limit your thinking. And someone on the other side may be reading from a playbook that treats your vulnerability as a tool.
That asymmetry is not a coincidence. It is the strategy.
Not Every Employer Uses This Playbook, But Some Do
To be clear: many employers negotiate severance agreements in good faith. They want to resolve the situation professionally and move on. The negotiations I described at the outset, cordial, efficient, and mutually acceptable, are common and reflect how most of these matters are handled.
But some employers do follow this playbook. And the ones who do will not tell you so.
What You Can Do About It
If you have received a severance offer, or believe one is coming, the most important step you can take is to have an experienced employment attorney review it before you respond.
Not because you need to be adversarial. Not because litigation is inevitable. But because you need someone in your corner who has read the same playbook the employer’s attorneys may be using: someone who can help you distinguish between a fair offer, a pressured one, and one that simply doesn’t reflect the full value of what you’re owed.
Experience in severance negotiation means knowing what to ask for, knowing when a deadline is a pressure tactic, and knowing how to respond to threats about reputation or legal exposure without being rattled by them.
That is the kind of representation Altus Law Firm provides.
About the Author
Andrew Jaramillo is an employment attorney at Altus Law Firm, based in Irvine, California. He represents executives in severance negotiations, wrongful termination matters, and employment disputes. If you have received a severance offer or believe one is coming, contact Altus Law Firm for a confidential consultation.