Legal Question in Business Law in California

Re: Employment Agreement Extension and Conclusion

It depends upon the language of the agreement. You most likely became an at-will employee at the end of the first five years, but the agreement could say otherwise.

Re: Employment Agreement Extension and Conclusion

Your agreement ended in 1999. Unless there is an extension clause specifically set forth in the agreement either, month-to-month year-to-year or for an additional five-year period as the original term was your out of luck. But you're not really out of luck you still employed. If the report between you and your employer is still good I would suggest you go to the employer with a short one paragraph document that reduce your contract for five years from its expiration, or five years from now, or some other term agreeable to both of you. The downside is though that if you are not good terms with him in this is why you are asking this question you see a lawyer who is well-versed in expertise in employment law, bringing the agreement to that lawyer and let him/her review the document and full and advice you accordingly. In fact do it even if you are good terms with your employer he may have some "hits" for you applicable to your situation and the document.

Re: Employment Agreement Extension and Conclusion

If the original agreement says anything about automatic renewal or what happens at expiration of the base term, that would of course govern.

Unlike real-property leases, however, employment contracts do not automatically renew as month-to-month or anything. Real property leases renew under certain conditions due to tradition and the Civil Code. There are no equivalent provisions for other types of agreements, or at least none that would extend an employment agreement, automatically, by a specific period.

What probably happened is that your express written contract expired on its 5th anniversary (probably July 1999 rather than September 1999) and was replaced by what is called a "contract implied in fact" (there are express contracts, both written and oral; contracts implied in fact; and contracts implied in law, which are also called quasi-contracts because they don't rely upon an agreement of the parties. But you and your employer are in contract, and the contract is implied from the facts, such as you perform services and the employer pays you.

When a court must infer the existence of a contract, it must also infer its terms, and to do that it will look at (1) the conduct of the parties and (2) prior dealings including the expired contract. For example, if you have been working 8 to 5, those are your contract hours, and if you show up at 8:30, you're late. If the company has been paying you $25 an hour, and one pay period they pay only $20, that's a breach.

OK, how much notice must either party to an implied employment contract give the other? That's a very tough question. Almost certainly not anything approaching five years. Interestingly, under repealed provisions of law, it once upon a time WOULD have been five years (Civil Code section 2012, later Labor Code section 3003, which said that the duration of an implied employment following a contracted term was the same). My guess is that your employment can be terminated without cause on the same notice as your pay period, i.e. if you're paid monthly you're entitled to 30 days' notice, but a judge would have to make the call, it's not something you can look up any more.