Read this "Whether you're showing employees to the door or being shown the door, you must avoid legal trouble. Veteran employment attorney NAME_1 shares the top layoff mistakes that companies make and outlines employee rights at pink-slip time.

Layoffs, downsizing and reorganizations have become dog-eared pages in the management playbook. No longer reserved solely for recessions, staff cuts seem to be called upon nearly any time a company misses its earnings. Can’t make your numbers? Cut payroll.

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Downsizing sounds simple, but executing a layoff is far more complicated than just shedding jobs. It requires serious planning, says NAME_1, a litigator with Bryan Cave LLP. Companies risk taking unlawful measures that may come back to haunt them if they don’t take the time to assess the goals of a layoff and determine the criteria for making cuts, then communicate those criteria to the managers involved and review the plan with corporate counsel, he says.

NAME_2, who has represented unions, employers and employees during his 30-year career in law, spoke with CIO.com about the top mistakes that companies make when conducting layoffs and the necessary steps for a legal layoff. He also shared advice about the rights that employees have during a downsizing.

CIO: What mistakes do companies make when conducting layoffs?

NAME_1: A layoff, like any other kind of important decision, requires people to think things through. It requires an agreement about your goals for the layoff, your criteria for achieving those goals, a process that clearly defines who’s going to be making decisions and a review of the process to make sure it’s been conducted lawfully and in the way you wanted. Sometimes, when companies are under a lot of economic pressure, they don’t feel they have the time to think through how to conduct a layoff and to review it with their [corporate] counsel before finalizing it. When economic pressures are great, people try to take shortcuts, which can then get them into problems.

What kinds of problems?

A layoff may have an adverse effect on some protected group, like people over a certain age or minority employees. If the [personnel] decisions that have been made are not well supported, there could be an inference that those decisions were intentional discrimination, rather than simply a cost cutting effort.

I’ve read cases where lower-level man