Excerpt: [Don't have an employment agreement specifying severance terms.] Don't assume you will get anything, employment attorneys say. That is not to say it's impossible; in some cases even if there is no preexisting agreement, the company might offer severance to restrict the employee from competing with it for a period of time, notes Kenneth Raskin, a compensation and employment partner at White & Case. But the employer, not the employee, owns that right. Merely asking the firm to provide you with a guarantee of severance in the event of termination without cause is very unlikely to work.

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