Are You Being Hired or Fired? This AI-Native Law Firm Can Help

Oct 16, 2026

Every year, millions of professionals face a layoff, a new job offer, or an executive exit, and most of them face these career transitions without knowing what's actually negotiable. Their employers set the terms, define what’s standard, and hold all the information.

FairPlay Law is a recently launched, AI-native employment law firm built to close that gap at scale by giving employees facing career transitions access to AI-driven document analysis alongside employment lawyers who exclusively represent employees and can negotiate on their behalf.

We sat down recently with FairPlay Law’s co-founders Sanjay Kamlani and David Perla to talk about why they launched FairPlay Law, its value to employees, why large law firms refer so many clients to them, and what's ahead for the business.

What inspired you to start FairPlay?

We launched FairPlay for some of the same reasons that we built our earlier company, Pangea3, a legal-services company that brought technology and process to legal work—we want to get clients great results in ways that save time and money. When we started thinking about what to build next, we kept coming back to the possibilities around employment law because of what we'd both experienced at the companies where we'd worked and advised: the person handling an employee's offer letter or severance agreement is experienced, well-resourced, has access to extensive amounts of compensation and employment-focused information, and represents the company’s interests.

The employee almost never has anyone on their side with that same fluency. AI now lets us close that gap in ways that weren't possible a few years ago, because now individual professionals can access the kind of document analysis and experience that used to be available only to large companies, and they can access those resources at a reasonable price and with speed that aligns with their urgent career transitions.

How does a prospective employee use FairPlay to analyze a job offer letter or employment agreement?

A prospective employee who wants to understand what their offer letter or agreement is really saying can go to www.fairplay.law and easily upload their employment documents (offers, equity, IP rights, separation, etc.) to FairPlay Analytics, our technology platform. The system reads the documents and produces a plain-language summary of the key terms, a heat map showing which provisions are favorable or unfavorable, and a market comparison for people in similar roles and compensation ranges.

That report is free, and it's designed to help someone decide whether they want to talk to a lawyer before they sign anything. If the individual professional does decide that they want to speak with a lawyer, they can schedule a paid consultation with one of our employment attorneys, who reviews and explains the report.

How does an employee use FairPlay to analyze a company's proposed severance package?

Again, an employee who wants to understand their employer’s proposed severance package can go to www.fairplay.law and upload their severance agreement and historical employment documents.

FairPlay Analytics will produce a plain-language breakdown and a market comparison. The substance of what the system is looking for varies by situation. On a severance package, it's checking things like the formula behind the payment, how unvested equity is being treated relative to the person's next vesting date, the scope of the release being asked for, and whether there's a deadline or revocation period that's about to run out. The system also reviews corporate documents like employee handbooks and publicly disclosed compensation plans. Those are the kinds of details that are easy to miss when someone is reading a severance agreement for the first time, under time pressure, right after losing a job.

How did your earlier work together and your own experiences as lawyers and executives negotiating executive offers and exits lead you here?

We’ve spent our careers largely on the company's side of employment issues, as general counsel, as executives, and inside large firms that represent employers. We’ve been the bosses’ lawyers. That gives us a specific kind of fluency: we know how these agreements get drafted and where there may be room to negotiate, because we've been the ones drafting them. We’ve also managed hundreds of people, so we know how to work with both clients and their employers and former employers.

Can you give us some examples of issues an employee will often want to address in an employment offer letter or employment agreement?

Employees regularly face a few issues with employment offer letters and employment agreements that FairPlay helps address. A big issue is total compensation versus base salary, because bonus targets, sign-on payments, and equity are often where the real negotiation room is, not the base number.

Another issue we help employees parse is equity terms, such as the vesting schedule, whether any equity accelerates on a termination without cause or a change of control, and how the strike price was set. We also help employees better understand restrictive covenants, because the scope, geography, and duration of any non-compete or non-solicit language vary enormously by state and are unenforceable in some.

Can you give us some examples of issues an employee will want to address in a company's proposed severance package?

Again, with severance, FairPlay helps employees face issues that are different but just as consequential. We help employees better understand their severance offer: is it a flat number, or a formula based on tenure or some other factor, and how does it compare to what similar companies pay in a similar situation?

We help them assess the treatment of their unvested equity, which is particularly important when a layoff happens close to a vesting date. We help them understand whether the release of legal claims and liability is mutual and whether covenants like non-disparagement and confidentiality are mutual.

If the severance agreement requires cooperation with any future investigation or litigation, we help them understand who chooses counsel and who pays for the employee's time, which is a provision people rarely think to negotiate and that can matter enormously years later.

And, of course, there are the situations where the company is retaliating, has used performance reviews or performance improvement plans (PIPs) as a tool, is treating the employee differently than others, or is otherwise offering severance amounts or terms that are unfair, inconsistent, or inappropriate to the circumstances.

FairPlay started as a tool that gave people a paid analysis of their own employment documents before referring them to its affiliated law firm. Why turn it into a law firm-facing model instead of leading with the technology product?

We realize that employees’ needs are best met by combining technology and human lawyers, and that’s why we launched FairPlay Law as an AI-native employment law firm rather than a technology company that refers work to its affiliated law firm.

We had started by giving people a paid AI data-driven analysis of their documents, with the plan to refer them to our affiliated law firm. What we quickly found was that most people were reaching out to us to talk with a lawyer, not for the AI report. Yet, once they saw the report with its clear analysis of what they were being offered or what risks they were taking, most of them wanted to retain our law firm lawyers, even when the dispute wasn't large-dollar and even when they had no interest in a lawsuit.

There's an information gap between an employer and an individual professional, and when FairPlay Analytics makes that gap visible, employees very often want a lawyer in their corner. That told us the technology worked best as the gateway to legal representation, not as a replacement for it, so we refocused our business to put FairPlay Law first, as an employment law firm with the technology built in from day one, rather than a technology company that refers work to lawyers.

What makes FairPlay different from a traditional employment lawyer, or from plaintiff's firms that advertise for the biggest possible claim?

FairPlay Law is built to handle employment law needs that aren’t served efficiently elsewhere in the market. Right now, everyday negotiations like offer letters, standard layoffs, executive exits, and the various other routine employment needs that professionals face just aren't big enough for a firm working on contingency to want to take on.

Simultaneously, traditional employment lawyers that charge by the hour are costly and out of reach for most individual employees. We built FairPlay to serve exactly that space: the negotiation that's meaningful to the person in it, priced with a flat fee and a transparent contingency instead of an hourly rate, and handled by lawyers who focus on employment matters day in and day out.

If someone does have a large claim, we'll tell them, and we'll represent them. But most of what we do is help people get a fair outcome on the ordinary moments that every professional goes through, such as a layoff, a performance-based termination, or a new job.

How do you earn trust, especially the trust required for someone to hand over their offer letter or severance agreement and rely on AI to read it?

We keep the two roles of AI analysis and human counsel distinct, and we make that clear. The benchmark report is information to help someone decide whether they want a lawyer: it isn't legal advice, and it doesn't create an attorney-client relationship.

Once a person engages FairPlay Law, our attorneys are advising and negotiating, with AI as a tool that helps them analyze more information, work faster, and cover more ground, not as a substitute for their judgment. That distinction is also why large law firms can be comfortable referring conflicted matters to us: they know a licensed employment attorney is working on every matter we take on, and that the technology enables, enhances, and speeds up the work without replacing the lawyer doing it.

What kind of clients use FairPlay today?

FairPlay Law’s clients are working professionals, mostly in the $100,000 to $1 million annual income range, across industries like technology, financial services, and healthcare. We also help influencers and content creators, who bring incredible talent to their audiences but who aren’t experts at negotiating with brands or branding agencies.

Some clients come to FairPlay at the start of a new job or engagement, when they've received an offer letter or an executive employment agreement and want a clear-eyed read before they sign.

Others come to FairPlay at the end of a role, dealing with a layoff, a negotiated exit, or a dispute with their employer or agency. What they have in common is that they want to know they're getting a fair outcome and not leaving something on the table, but they don't have easy access to an employment lawyer.

What is the cost for using FairPlay?

FairPlay supports professionals seeking help in stages, from providing information to offering consultation, to guidance, to full representation. It starts with the free FairPlay Analytics report—a plain-language summary and a market comparison. From there, a prospective client can book a $350 consultation with a FairPlay Law attorney to walk through the report. If they want to move forward, we offer flat-fee negotiation packages—$2,500 for negotiation guidance, $5,000 for full representation where we negotiate directly—plus a contingency on any additional compensation we help someone secure. Each stage is priced on its own, so someone only pays for the level of help they actually want.

One of FairPlay's primary channels is referrals from large law firms. What problem are you solving for those firms?

Lawyers at large law firms that represent companies are frequently being asked by friends, neighbors, former colleagues, and even former clients for help with routine employee matters like severance and offer letters and new employment negotiations. They usually can't help. It's a conflict, since the firm's business is representing employers, not employees, and its pricing model isn't built for this kind of work either.

Turning that person away with nothing doesn't serve them well, and it isn't a great position for the referring lawyer to be in. FairPlay exists to be the place those lawyers can send that matter with confidence, knowing the person will be represented by senior employment counsel, offered a transparent price, and treated with the same seriousness a large firm brings to its own work.

Tell me more about how FairPlay's AI analysis of employee documents actually works. Where does the precedent data come from, and how do you keep it current as company severance and equity practices change?

FairPlay Analytics, our technology platform, draws on thousands of real employment documents to provide insights into what’s fair, standard, and negotiable. In addition to public data, like public filings, published compensation and severance frameworks, executive employment documents, and market benchmarks, we are also building our own proprietary database of de-identified private employment documents and outcomes.

Our RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) system harnesses this data to produce the FairPlay Analytics report, which our attorneys utilize together with their own experience negotiating matters. As we represent clients, our lawyers see firsthand how specific companies and industries are actually handling offers, layoffs, and equity treatment in real time, and that experience feeds back into how the platform benchmarks the next agreement.

Company practices shift—a severance formula that was standard eighteen months ago isn't necessarily standard today—so keeping the underlying data current, rather than static, is central to how the system stays useful.

Zooming out, what excites you most about AI's role in closing the legal accessibility gap for people who'd otherwise never talk to a lawyer at all?

Most U.S. professionals never talk to an employment lawyer before they sign an offer letter or a severance agreement, not because they don't need one, but because a traditional hourly engagement doesn't make sense for the decision in front of them, and because most employment lawyers want only large, high-priced matters. The same is true for influencers and content creators.

AI lets us bring the fluency of an experienced employment lawyer to that moment at a cost and speed that fits an individual's situation. What excites us most is that this doesn't have to stop at employment. The same idea, meeting people at a high-stakes decision with real expertise, priced for an individual, applies to plenty of other moments in someone's professional and personal life.

What's next for FairPlay?

In the near term, we're expanding our FairPlay attorney network and our co-counsel relationships state by state, and deepening the referral relationships we've built with law firms, executive search consultants, and other advisors who work with professionals in transition.

Longer term, we see FairPlay extending beyond employment into other high-stakes moments in people’s professional and personal lives, where FairPlay’s combination of AI insight and expert lawyers has the potential to help fulfill the same need for accessible insight and counsel at the right time and the right price. Employment is where we started because it's where that problem is most acute, but we are excited about extending our impact.

Related Articles: