Employment Engagements

• • For an international hotel chain, we recently settled an emotionally charged race/religion/ethnicity harassment and discrimination case before any depositions were taken.  The settlement was funded with a very substantial contribution from the defendant's insurance carrier.
    
  • Before the filing of any formal complaint or adverse publicity, we successfully mediated explosive allegations of sexual harassment brought by an employee against a high-ranking corporate vice president.
    
  • In a New York Stock Exchange arbitration involving the enforcement of a non-competition clause, we obtained a $3.4 million award on behalf of three former partners of an investment bank.  In addition, the arbitrators took the extraordinary step of granting our request for attorneys’ fees, although there was no attorneys’ fees provision in the contract at issue.
    
  • On behalf of a major California food and beverage producer, we defended and successfully mediated parallel sexual harassment and age discrimination claims brought by two former employees (the complaining party and her alleged harasser).
    
  • We regularly appear before the Labor Commissioner in hearings regarding wages, hours, commissions, bonuses and working conditions.
    
  • On behalf of a major Bay Area company, we successfully negotiated a resolution of a potential class action wage and hour claim prior to the filing of any formal lawsuit.  This was accomplished without paying any settlement amount.
    
  • We defended and settled the sexual harassment and age discrimination claims of a former faculty member at a Bay Area private school. Because the alleged harassment led in part to the break-up of the school, we also concurrently resolved complex unfair competition claims.
    
  • Our defense papers prompted a plaintiff’s counsel to withdraw (and likewise caused the Department of Fair Employment and Housing to drop its investigation) regarding claims of an employee who had complained about alleged sexual harassment and was terminated just a few weeks later.
    
  • We successfully represented a software company against pregnancy discrimination, sexual harassment, and wage claims brought by a former executive, and obtained an arbitration ruling that not only completely rejected the executive’s claims, but also awarded our client damages for the executive’s financial fraud while employed at the company.
    
  • We defended the president of an S&L against a lawsuit by the former general counsel, who claimed that he had been wrongfully terminated as a result of advising management of illegal lending practices.