Reduction in Force Review

Reduction in Force Review

Purpose

Produce a structured, attorney-ready organization of a proposed group termination or reduction in force (RIF) before it proceeds. The skill documents the business rationale, the decisional unit and selection process as described, and the proposed severance and communication plan; frames adverse-impact and comparator questions for counsel; and flags group-notice and group-release formalities as verification items. It never computes or concludes on disparate impact, never asserts a notice threshold, headcount trigger, or notice period, and never computes a date. This is draft legal work product for attorney review — not legal advice.

Use When

• An employer, HR team, or in-house counsel is planning a layoff, restructuring, site closure, or other group termination and wants the legal review points organized before decisions are finalized.
• Counsel needs a structured intake of a proposed RIF — rationale, decisional unit, criteria, selection list status, severance plan, and timeline — to begin their own risk assessment.
• A user says "we're planning a RIF — what should legal be looking at?" or "help me organize this layoff for outside counsel."
• The selection process or criteria are still being designed and the team wants the adverse-impact and consistency questions surfaced early.
• A group severance program is being prepared and the group-release documentation items need to be inventoried.

Required Inputs

• Business rationale: the employer's stated reason for the reduction (cost, restructuring, site closure, product discontinuation, or other), recorded precisely as stated.
• Decisional unit(s) and selection process as described: the organizational scope within which selections are or will be made, who decides, who reviews, and the sequence of the process.
• Selection criteria as described: the stated criteria (role elimination, skills, performance, tenure, or other) and whether they are objective, subjective, or mixed.
• Selection list status: whether a proposed list exists; if provided, the affected roles, levels, and work locations as stated. Use anonymized identifiers — do not place employee names into reusable work product.
• Proposed severance, benefits, and release terms, if any: the proposed structure, tiers, and any draft release documents referenced.

Optional but recommended:

• The proposed timeline and communication plan, including any dates already announced (recorded, never computed — [deadline verification required]).
• Whether any affected population is unionized or covered by a collective agreement, employment contracts, or works-council or collective-consultation arrangements.

If any required input is missing, stop and request it before proceeding. Do not fabricate criteria, selection facts, headcounts, or program terms.

Do Not Use When

• The question is the risk of a single proposed termination rather than a group program — use termination-risk for the individual analysis. This skill organizes the group-level picture; individuals on the list who present distinct risk factors are routed to termination-risk.
• The task is to review a drafted severance or separation agreement — use severance-review for the document review. This skill inventories the group-release documentation items; it does not review agreement text.
• An affected employee is on, has recently taken, or has recently returned from protected leave and the question is the leave-specific interference or retaliation exposure — use protected-leave-review for that deep-dive.
• The user asks the skill to run a statistical disparate-impact analysis or to conclude whether the selection has an adverse impact — that analysis is counsel-directed (and often privileged) work this skill only frames questions for.
• The user needs jurisdiction-specific conclusions about notice obligations, thresholds, or lawfulness — this skill provides workflow discipline, not legal opinions.

Legal Safety Rules

• Source and citation discipline. Follow core/source-and-citation-discipline.md. Never invent legal authority, citations, quotations, statutes, cases, regulations, filing deadlines, or procedural rules. Label what is a provided source, a user-provided fact, an assumption, a legal inference, or an item requiring attorney verification, and use a citation placeholder such as [Attorney to insert authority] when no source is available.
• Produce draft legal work product for attorney review only. This is not legal advice.
• Never compute or conclude on disparate impact. Do not run statistical comparisons, characterize a selection pattern as adverse or neutral, or state that a criterion does or does not have a disparate impact. Frame every adverse-impact point as a question for counsel, who directs any statistical analysis — often under privilege.
• Never assert a group-notice threshold, headcount trigger, or notice period. Describe WARN-style mass-layoff and plant-closing notice regimes, their state and local analogs, and non-US collective-consultation regimes only as categories to verify. Every such item carries [Verify current law] and [deadline verification required].
• Never compute any date — announcement dates, notice dates, separation dates, consideration or revocation periods. Record dates as provided and flag each [deadline verification required].
• Do not assert day counts, disclosure content requirements, or eligibility rules for group-release waivers. Treat age-waiver disclosure attachments as a document-checklist item for counsel [Verify current law].
• Do not assert what is or is not lawful in any jurisdiction. Identify the work jurisdictions of the affected sites and flag every jurisdiction-dependent point [verify jurisdiction].
• Separate facts provided by the user from assumptions and from items requiring attorney verification. Label each category clearly.
• Flag every potential risk factor — criteria design, timing, protected activity, comparator questions — as an item for attorney assessment. Never conclude whether a risk factor is legally significant.
• Preserve confidentiality and privilege. RIF planning materials are highly sensitive; use anonymized identifiers and do not place employee-identifying information into reusable template copies. Note for counsel that adverse-impact analyses are often conducted under privilege — how to structure that is an attorney decision.
• Use [CONFIRM: ...] placeholders wherever governing law, program facts, or documentation status is uncertain.

Workflow

1. Confirm inputs. Verify that the business rationale, decisional unit and selection process, selection criteria, selection list status, and proposed severance terms are available as described. If any are missing, stop and request them.

2. Establish the jurisdiction and posture gates. List every work jurisdiction where affected employees sit (including remote workers' actual locations), note any unionized or collectively covered populations, and record the client posture (employer-side planning). Flag each jurisdiction-dependent point downstream with [verify jurisdiction]. If any location is unknown, flag [CONFIRM: work locations of affected employees].

3. Record the business rationale. Capture the employer's articulated reason precisely as stated, and note what contemporaneous documentation supports it (board materials, budget analyses, restructuring plans). Note gaps between the stated rationale and the documentation record — consistency here is what counsel will defend later.

4. Document the decisional unit and selection process as described. Record the organizational scope of each decisional unit, who proposes selections, who reviews them, and whether legal review is built into the sequence. Flag any ambiguity in the decisional-unit definition as [ATTORNEY TO CONFIRM: decisional-unit definition] — it drives both the adverse-impact framing and group-release disclosure content.

5. Record the selection criteria as described. For each criterion, note whether it is objective or subjective, whether it is documented, who applies it, and whether it is applied uniformly across the decisional unit. Flag heavily subjective or undocumented criteria for counsel's attention — as a consistency and defensibility question, not a legal conclusion.

6. Frame adverse-impact questions for counsel. Without computing anything, list the questions counsel will need answered: whether the selection pattern will be assessed across protected characteristics before finalization; whether the analysis will be run within each decisional unit; who will run it and under what privilege structure; and whether criteria will be revisited if the pattern raises concern. Record any user-stated demographic observations as user-provided facts only. Do not characterize any pattern as adverse, neutral, or acceptable — [ATTORNEY TO CONFIRM: adverse-impact assessment approach and results].

7. Flag individual-file risk factors on the list. For the selected population as described, note (anonymized) any individuals with recent protected activity, complaints, leave, accommodation requests, workers' compensation claims, or vesting-proximate timing. Routing note: route each such individual's deep-dive to termination-risk, and leave-specific interference or retaliation questions to protected-leave-review. This skill records the flag; it does not perform the individual analysis.

8. Inventory group-notice obligations as categories. Identify, as verification categories only: WARN-style mass-layoff and plant-closing notice regimes and their state and local analogs for each affected jurisdiction; collective-consultation, works-council, or government-notification regimes for any non-US population; and any contractual or collective-agreement notice obligations. For each: never assert whether a threshold is met, what the headcount trigger is, or what the notice period is — record the affected headcounts and sites as provided and flag [Verify current law] [deadline verification required] [verify jurisdiction]. Aggregation questions (phased reductions, nearby sites, prior layoffs counting toward a trigger) are attorney questions — flag them.

9. Inventory group-release formalities as a document checklist. If releases will be sought, list the documentation items for counsel: the release agreement itself (route its review to severance-review); for any group program, the age-waiver disclosure attachment describing the decisional unit, eligibility factors, and the job titles and ages of individuals selected and not selected — as a required-document item, with no day counts or content rules asserted [Verify current law]; and the consideration and revocation recitations, recorded but never computed [deadline verification required]. See Section 2.2 (Group termination without required disclosure attachment) of skills/employment/references/severance-release-red-flags.md for the pattern to check.

10. Check severance and benefits consistency. Record the proposed severance structure (formula, tiers, benefits continuation, equity treatment) and compare it for internal consistency: like treatment for like roles, documented reasons for any exceptions, and consistency with any severance plan, policy, or past program the user identifies. Flag every deviation and every discretionary exception for attorney review — inconsistency across a group is itself a risk pattern.

11. Review the communication plan for legal review points. Record the proposed announcement sequence, manager talking points, written notices, and external messaging. Flag for counsel: statements of reasons that could conflict with the documented rationale; promises about references, rehire, or future employment; statements about notice or severance entitlements not yet verified; and any coordination needed between notification timing and group-notice obligations [deadline verification required].

12. Record the timeline as provided. List every proposed date — decision, notice, announcement, separation, release deadlines — exactly as provided, each flagged [deadline verification required]. Never compute, validate, or reconcile any of them; sequencing legal prerequisites onto the timeline is an attorney task.

13. Assemble the output. Produce the structured summary in the format below, labeled as a draft for attorney review.

Output Format

Deliver the following sections, clearly labeled:

1. Program Overview — rationale as stated, decisional unit(s), affected jurisdictions and populations, and posture.
2. Selection Process and Criteria Summary — the process and criteria as described, with consistency and documentation flags.
3. Adverse-Impact Questions for Counsel — the framed question set from Step 6; no computations, no conclusions.
4. Individual-File Flags — anonymized list of individuals routed to termination-risk or protected-leave-review, with the flag for each.
5. Group-Notice Verification Items — the category inventory from Step 8, each item flagged [Verify current law] [deadline verification required] [verify jurisdiction].
6. Group-Release Document Checklist — the items from Step 9, including the disclosure-attachment item, with agreement review routed to severance-review.
7. Severance and Benefits Consistency Table — structure, tiers, exceptions, and each flagged deviation.
8. Communication Plan Review Points — each flagged statement or coordination item.
9. Timeline as Provided — every date as stated, each [deadline verification required].
10. Open Items for Attorney Verification — numbered list of unresolved questions.
11. Assumptions — explicit list of facts assumed in the absence of confirmed information.

Use [CONFIRM: ...] throughout wherever any fact, legal requirement, or procedural step is unverified. Label the complete output: Draft legal work product for attorney review. Not legal advice.

Optional: Business Stakeholder Summary

When the output will be used to brief a non-lawyer business stakeholder — a product owner, deal lead, people manager, founder, or executive — add a Business Stakeholder Summary as a clearly separated, plainly labeled section, following core/business-stakeholder-communication.md. Produce it only when the user requests it or when the audience is plainly a business decision-maker. It is an addition to the deliverable above — never a replacement for it, and never a substitute for attorney review. It contains:

• Business Summary — the bottom line in plain language, with unnecessary legal jargon removed and legal risk stated separately from business and commercial risk.
• Decision Needed — the specific business decision(s) now on the table, stated as concrete choices, each with its owner.
• Recommended Ask — the legal team's recommended position or course of action, framed as a recommendation for the business to weigh, not a decision made on its behalf.
• Fallback Position — the minimum acceptable alternative if the Recommended Ask cannot be achieved.
• Escalation Needed? — whether the matter should be escalated, to whom (senior management, the board, or outside counsel), and why — or a plain statement that no escalation is needed.

Attorney Verification Checklist

• The business rationale is accurate, consistently documented, and consistent with what will be communicated.
• The decisional unit(s) are correctly defined for both the adverse-impact assessment and any group-release disclosure. [verify jurisdiction]
• Selection criteria have been reviewed for job-relatedness, consistency of application, and documentation; subjective criteria have been assessed.
• An adverse-impact assessment has been directed by counsel, under an appropriate privilege structure, before selections are finalized — no conclusions from this document have been treated as that assessment.
• Every individual flagged for protected activity, leave, accommodation, or timing concerns has received an individual review via termination-risk (and protected-leave-review where applicable).
• Comparator and re-deployment questions (alternatives to termination, open roles, bumping practices) have been assessed for the affected population.
• All group-notice obligations — WARN-style regimes, state and local analogs, and any collective-consultation or government-notification regimes — have been confirmed for every affected jurisdiction, including aggregation across phases and sites. [Verify current law] [deadline verification required]
• Union, works-council, collective-agreement, and individual-contract notice or consultation obligations have been confirmed. [verify jurisdiction]
• Group-release requirements have been confirmed, including consideration and revocation periods and the content and accuracy of any age-waiver disclosure attachment. [Verify current law] [deadline verification required]
• The release agreement and severance documents have been reviewed via severance-review and by counsel.
• Severance and benefits treatment is consistent across the group, and every exception has a documented, reviewed justification.
• Final-pay, accrued-leave, and benefits-continuation obligations have been confirmed for each affected jurisdiction. [verify jurisdiction] [deadline verification required]
• The communication plan, talking points, and written notices have been reviewed by counsel and are consistent with the documented rationale.
• The timeline has been verified by counsel — every date and sequencing dependency confirmed; nothing in this document computed a deadline. [deadline verification required]
• No legal conclusions in this document have been relied upon without attorney review and confirmation.