QUESTION AND ANSWER

The law firm has a client, Lara Perez, who is currently 53 years old and was recently terminated from her job at Acme Telecommunications. Ms. Perez worked for Acme for 15 years at the point that her employment was terminated. Ms. Perez has a bachelor's degree and started at an entry-level position, but worked her way up to a management position. She also acquired several job-related certifications during this time. Ms. Perez consistently received the highest ratings on her performance evaluations. Two years ago Acme was bought by a larger parent company and new management was brought in. Ms. Perez feels that the new management put pressure on older employees of Acme to retire. Despite her superior ratings and experience, Ms. Perez was moved into a position at Acme that had less responsibility than she had previously. Employees who were more than 15 years younger than Ms. Perez and had less experience and qualifications were promoted over Ms. Perez. She felt there were a number of occasions where her age was referred to negatively by her boss. Ms. Perez complained to the human resources department that she felt that she was being treated unfairly because of her age. A month later, Ms. Perez received her first negative rating on a performance evaluation and shortly afterwards was terminated from her position. She was replaced by a new hire, who is 25 years old, and who does not have any experience in the communications industry, Lisa Garcia has asked you to work with Mark, the new paralegal, to show him how to form a research plan for this case.

What is the place of secondary authority in your research plan?
How would you go about researching primary sources for this case? Give examples of key words that you would use to research this case.
On which jurisdictions and courts would you focus for researching this case.