- Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
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- Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
- - SE HABLA ESPAÑOL
Fired from a Burbank job after HR ran a paper investigation that confirmed nothing? The firm represents workers across California whose terminations crossed the legal line, and the cases get litigated, not just filed.
NYU Law & NYU Stern MBA · Skadden alumni · Latham & Watkins alumni · Free first call · Contingency representation
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Was the reason given for your Burbank termination thinner than your work history? Maybe the timing tracked an accommodation request, a leave filing, an internal complaint, or a refusal to participate in something the company knew was unlawful. If the dates line up that way, the termination probably crossed a California statute, and the documents will say so. The firm pursues those cases. A successful claim recovers the wages and benefits the firing took, the emotional harm a wrongful termination produces, attorneys’ fees billed against the employer rather than carved out of the worker’s verdict, and punitive damages where the employer’s conduct rose to malice or fraud. Simon Moshkovich — NYU Law, former Skadden and Latham & Watkins — reviews every Burbank intake personally and gives a yes-or-no read on the same call. Cases that will not carry get the same honest answer cases with merit do.
Mercer Legal Group is a California employment practice on the worker side of the docket. The firm has no defense engagements — that side of the bar goes elsewhere. Simon Moshkovich trained on the management side at Skadden and at Latham & Watkins before opening the practice for plaintiffs. Workers in Burbank and the wider studio corridor get Simon’s eyes on the file at intake, and the same senior attorney through every phase. There is no associate handoff at the discovery hand-off that volume shops run on.
California sets the wrongful-termination bar well above the federal floor. Under FEHA, a firing tied to age over 40, race, gender, pregnancy, disability, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity is unlawful. A firing in retaliation for filing a workers’ compensation claim, for taking CFRA leave for the worker’s own condition or a covered family member, for raising a harassment complaint, for surfacing a wage problem, or for reporting suspected unlawful conduct to a regulator under Labor Code section 1102.5 is also unlawful. The reason these cases hold up is contemporaneous evidence — Slack threads, calendar invites, performance reviews that shifted in the weeks after the protected activity. What Burbank-area studios, post houses, and studio-vendor employers tend to substitute is a pretext: a new performance write-up, a reorganization, or a cultural-fit complaint surfacing days after the complaint or accommodation request. The documents rarely back the story.
A California wrongful-termination recovery splits between economic loss and a separate track for the employer’s conduct. Back pay covers every component of the paycheck — base salary, commissions, guild residuals where they apply, bonuses, vested or near-vested equity, 401(k) match, and the cost of replaced health and dental coverage — from the termination date through verdict. Front pay handles the gap between the career path the firing destroyed and the path that exists now. Emotional-distress damages run uncapped under California law and do not require a treatment record, though one tightens the credibility of the claim. Punitive damages reach employers whose conduct was willful, fraudulent, or oppressive, and Los Angeles County juries with studio and post-production exposure have been comfortable making the punitive number meaningful. A FEHA plaintiff who wins also recovers attorneys’ fees from the defendant. Retaliation and FEHA statutes of limitation run from one to three years, and early intake protects the largest possible damages window.
No-cost review for workers in Burbank. The first call delivers a direct read on whether the wrongful-termination claim is worth pursuing and what damages range fits the file.
A Burbank case gets built from documents, not from theories. The first move is preservation — your own emails, Slack and Teams threads, calendar invites, performance reviews, and text exchanges with managers — captured into the file before anything in the employer’s environment can be cleaned up. Next comes the protective filing with the California Civil Rights Department, the EEOC, or the Labor Commissioner, freezing the statutory deadline. Discovery is where the file actually takes shape: HR records, manager email chains, prior complaints against the same decision-maker, the gap between written policy and actual practice. Depositions follow, and the employer’s stated reason rarely survives contact with its own paper trail. Once the record is built, the worker chooses: settle on real terms, or take the matter to verdict. Either path has to be backed by evidence to be a real choice — that is the work.
The firm rarely gets hired off a billboard. It gets hired through a referral from someone whose case finally received attention after the first firm did not give it any. Workers in Burbank tend to tell the same story: signed on with a high-volume plaintiff shop, got reassigned to whichever associate had open capacity, and watched the file drift toward a quick payoff that served the firm more than the worker. The firm runs the inverse: senior-attorney attention on every active file, a deliberately tight docket so the case is not stacked behind two hundred others, no defense-side engagements that would create a quiet conflict with the studios and vendor companies the firm needs to sue, and a real filter at intake. The cases the firm declines outnumber the ones it accepts. The yes, when it comes, is earned.
A short selection of California employment matters the firm has worked through to resolution. The Burbank-area facts inside each file were specific to that case — prior outcomes carry no guarantee about a future claim.
A long-tenured manager at a Southern California logistics company was fired after escalating wage-and-hour concerns through internal channels. The performance basis the employer relied on did not exist in any pre-complaint review. Discovery turned the decision-makers’ own correspondence, and the matter resolved in the seven figures, confidentially, before trial.
A technical lead at a California manufacturer was let go within weeks of escalating documented compliance issues to senior management. Targeted discovery into the chain of decision-makers surfaced the records that drove the resolution, and the matter settled on confidential terms.
An employee was terminated weeks after lodging a documented internal complaint about harassment by a direct supervisor. The performance reason the company offered did not square with the prior year’s reviews. The matter resolved through mediation with a confidential payment and clean separation language.
Reach the firm at (818) 538-3458 or via the contact form. A three- or four-sentence summary of what happened is enough to set the call. The conversation is confidential from first contact.
Simon or a senior attorney runs the timeline with you on the call and delivers a direct read: viable claim or not, the defenses the employer will reach for, the realistic value of the matter. The cases that will not carry get that read up front.
On a viable case, a written preservation memo goes out the same week — what to save across email, text, Slack, and personal accounts; what to stop doing; what to say if a former manager or HR reaches out. When the deadline is short, the agency filing goes in immediately.
Once the record is built, the call is yours: take the strongest settlement the file will support, or push the matter to verdict. The firm’s job is to make sure both paths are real options backed by evidence.
Free consultation. Every Burbank-area intake reaches Simon Moshkovich personally before any retainer is signed.
