The most important thing you can tell an employment lawyer is not what happened to you. It is WHY you think it happened.
Almost every intake I read starts the same way. Someone was fired. They walk me through the day it happened, what the manager said, how long they had been there, how good their reviews were. Then they tell me how it felt. Unfair. Humiliating. Out of nowhere, after years of good reviews.
All of that is real, and I understand why it comes out first. It is just not the part that tells me whether I can help.
What I need is the WHY.
Not why it felt wrong to you.
Why the company did it.
Start with what the company said. What reason did they give you, out loud or in writing, for firing you? Performance. Restructuring. Violation of a policy. Whatever it was, tell me the words they used.
Then tell me what you believe the real reason was. I assume you believe their stated reason is false or you would not be contacting a lawyer. So, what is underneath it? Who made the decision, and what did that person know about you before they made it? Was it due to your membership in a protected EEO category? Age, race, sex, disability, pregnancy, etc? Was it because of a protected report your made? Protected reports are usually reporting discrimination or harassment based on an EEO category. Was it because you filed a workers compensation claim? You get the idea.
If this is a disability case, I need three specifics. What your medical condition is. What you and your doctor actually asked the company to do. And what the company said back.
Here is why those questions matter more than everything else in the file.
In most termination cases, employment law does not turn on what the employer did. It turns on why the employer did it. The motive has to be an unlawful one. No law requires your employer to be fair to you, or reasonable, or decent. A boss can be wrong, petty, and dishonest, and none of that by itself is illegal.
So leave fairness out of it entirely. The real question is whether you were fired because of something the law actually protects, either because you belong to a protected category or because you did something protected, like reporting discrimination or asking for an accommodation for a disability.
One more thing, about how this looks from our side of the desk.
There are not many lawyers in Texas who represent employees. The ones who do can hear from twenty or thirty people a day. Nobody can have a real conversation with all of them, so we triage. We read the intake and we look for the why.
When it is there, you are far more likely to get a longer conversation. When it is missing, your situation reads like a hundred others, and there is no way to tell yours apart.
The what and the how it felt will keep. The why is the part only you can give us, and it is the part that decides whether anyone can do anything about it.