My experience is that the note at the end of the article-- that most issues like this one go to court or worse-- is the sad reality. I fought my company's gene

My experience is that the note at the end of the article-- that most issues like this one go to court or worse-- is the sad reality. I fought my company's general counsel for an entire quarter to get them to honor a verbal promise of a stock bonus. The bonus was decent (+20% of my original grant, though they had lowballed me originally) though essentially worthless (<$10k over 4 years) at the time. I was a junior-level individual contributor. After a quarter of fighting, the general counsel denied me by having the board change my grant without my signed approval. By then, it was basically too late to sue, the grant didn't have any value anyways, and I wouldn't have had much of a chance of vesting the grant (over 4 years) had I sued anyways (as the management had been historically liberal with firing people). I eventually got the majority of the value of the stock awarded after bringing to light the experience of another employee who had been treated with a similar gross lack of integrity. They didn't fire me, but they aggressively managed me out of the team (into a role where I had essentially zero chance of further bonuses). Oral stock contracts are tricky business. Sometimes a court will uphold them, sometimes not: * http://calcorporatelaw.com/2012/10/court-of-appeal-upholds-unsigned-stock-option-agreement/ http://calcorporatelaw.com/2012/10/court-of-appeal-upholds-u... * https://books.google.com/books?id=Db1uzraBVugC https://books.google.com/books?id=Db1uzraBVugC It's really, really appealing for companies to weasel out of unwritten contracts, especially if they feel there's little monetary risk and their legal team has reviewed what might be discovered in a potential case. While I agree we shouldn't set such a low bar, we've yet to engineer a solid mechanism to steer companies towards the better. The law expects businesses to keep good records. We shouldn't let them abuse the privilege of non-documentation.