A high-profile Director of Premium Sales was abruptly terminated by Avant Gardner, the company behind Brooklyn Mirage, with substantial commissions unpaid. Because the parties never formally documented his commissions arrangement, Avant Gardner’s General Counsel took the position that there was no basis for payment. Over $60,000 in commissions hung in the balance.

The core challenge was establishing entitlement through the surrounding record. We assembled contemporaneous compensation discussions, internal sales records, and testimony from a former executive who confirmed he had approved the arrangement. The director had raised the unpaid compensation prior to his departure, and the revenue figures used to calculate the claim were drawn directly from the company’s own records.

Reframing the issue as an unpaid-wage claim with mounting statutory exposure created negotiation momentum and shifted the focus from the absence of a signed agreement to whether the company could successfully defend withholding compensation supported by its own internal records and executive testimony.

Faced with mandatory fee-shifting and credible wage theft claims, Avant Gardner’s hard-nosed initial refusal soon turned into insistence that $45,000 was a reasonable amount for our client. We disagreed and although we believe we would have prevailed, any cost in pursuing the claim through litigation would eventually yield a net return not much greater than the current offer (while adding stress and irreversible time loss). In the end, we accepted the counter and papered the settlement concluding a two week negotiation that converted a 0-severance termination with undocumented commissions into a $45,000 settlement.