Employment Counsel
& Litigation
Spector Louden Law Group is the solo practice of Elizabeth Spector Louden, a former Proskauer litigator and former Etsy Deputy General Counsel. It exists for two moments in a company's life: the everyday decisions where the right counsel quietly prevents a dispute, and the crisis where you need a seasoned litigator to parachute in.
Big-firm trial craft and public-company judgment, delivered directly, on flat or capped fees, without the associate pyramid or the overhead that makes traditional firms slow and expensive.
One senior lawyer, delivering big-firm work through an AI-native operating model: judgment first, with frontier AI carrying the load under my direct control.
An AI-Native Methodology
Frontier models, run as supervised agents, handle the work that once took a team of associates, paralegals, and vendors. The result is partner-caliber output on flat or capped fees. See the methodology.
AI Governance for Your Workforce
The same fluency I use to run this practice, I bring to clients: cross-functional AI oversight, governance and policy, privilege, training, and human-in-the-loop standards. Explore the practice.
Practice
A management-side employment practice covering the full range of workplace needs, from strategic counsel on workforce decisions to crisis litigation and investigations.
Employment Counseling
Most employment risk is created in everyday decisions about pay, structure, and people. I advise companies (and the general counsel, boards, and investors behind them) on getting those decisions right.
HR & Compensation Advice
Pay and incentive design, wage-and-hour compliance, worker classification, and the policies that keep routine HR decisions from becoming exposure.
M&A & Deal Support
Labor and employment due diligence, advance analysis of workforce liabilities and executive compensation and benefits structures, integration planning, post-closing workforce issues, and counsel on employment matters when deals break down, across the full arc of a transaction.
Workforce Strategic Design
Structuring teams, roles, and reporting lines for growth, so the company is built the way it can defensibly hire, manage, and reward people.
Reduction in Force
Layoffs and restructurings end to end: selection criteria, disparate-impact review, WARN Act compliance, separation agreements, and the messaging around them.
Independent Contractor Strategy
Designing and defending contractor and contingent-workforce models against misclassification risk under shifting federal and state standards.
Global Employee Footprint Strategy
Building and managing a compliant cross-border workforce: entity and employment models and country-by-country risk across North America (Canada, Mexico), the UK and EU (especially Ireland, Germany, and the Netherlands), India, and Brazil, informed by scaling a company across ten countries.
AI Governance & Policy
Standing up and leading the cross-functional team that owns how a company uses AI, then designing the governance and written policies that direct it. I advise on protecting privilege when AI touches legal and other sensitive work, on what a department actually needs to buy (including the practical difference between a frontier model, a non-frontier model, and a wrapper built on top of one), and on the data cleanup that has to happen first, since any system is only as accurate as the data underneath it.
AI Workforce Training & Ethics
Teaching people to use these tools safely: closed systems versus open ones, what is and isn't safe to put into a model, and the risks hiding in meeting-recording and transcription features. I also help set the human-in-the-loop checks and metrics that keep AI use in the workplace accountable and ethical.
Litigation & Investigations
When a charge lands, an executive has to go, or a matter could become a headline, I parachute in, with Proskauer-trained trial craft and board-level investigation experience.
Employment Litigation & Trials
Defending employers in discrimination, harassment, retaliation, wage-and-hour, and wrongful-termination claims, from EEOC, DOL, and NLRB charges through arbitration and trial.
Workplace Investigations
Independent investigations into executive misconduct, fraud, harassment, and compliance failures: credible to a board, defensible to a regulator.
Sensitive Executive Exits
C-suite separations, founder disputes, whistleblower matters, and executive-compensation disputes, handled with discretion and an eye on the messaging.
Workforce & Reputation Risk
Restructurings, union dynamics, and AI, policy, and governance exposure: the legal and reputational risk built into a company's biggest workforce decisions.
Experience
Spector Louden Law Group pairs a lawyer trained at the top of the employment bar with the judgment of a public-company general counsel, and an AI-augmented, flat-and-capped-fee structure. The result is senior representation at a price traditional staffing models cannot match.
Proskauer & the Courtroom
Trained as a litigator at Proskauer Rose, Elizabeth learned to defend employers in their hardest disputes, through mediations, depositions, arbitrations including FINRA, and trial preparation.
In the Client's Chair
As Deputy General Counsel and Global Head of Labor & Employment at Etsy, Inc., she sat where her clients sit, building and running the people function as the company scaled from roughly 800 to more than 3,500 employees across ten countries and three acquisitions, and steering it through an activist campaign.
The years inside top firms and a public company didn't hold me back. They built the lawyer you're hiring.
Jurisdictions & Network
The practice is anchored in New York and California, and reaches the jurisdictions where growth companies actually build their workforces. Cross-border matters are handled directly where I'm admitted and through a vetted network of local counsel everywhere else, coordinated under one point of contact so the strategy stays coherent across borders.
- United States (New York & California)
- North America (Canada & Mexico)
- United Kingdom
- European Union (especially Ireland, Germany & the Netherlands)
- India
- Brazil
Credentials & Admissions
- J.D., NYU School of Law
- B.A., magna cum laude & Phi Beta Kappa, University of Pennsylvania
- Harvard Agentic AI, 2026
- Formerly Proskauer Rose (Labor & Employment)
- Deputy General Counsel & Global Head of Labor & Employment, Etsy, Inc.
- Admitted: New York · S.D.N.Y., E.D.N.Y., E.D. Mich. · PA, NJ, DE (pending)
Results
A selection of representative work, described in the anonymized terms that sensitive engagements require, with room to add specific outcomes and client voices as the practice grows.
Litigation
Won pre-trial dismissal of combined age- and disability-discrimination claims brought by a long-tenured employee, defeating an eight-figure demand.
Defended age- and race-discrimination claims brought by a senior executive, involving contested allegations of racially coded language.
Managed a harassment matter that played out partly in public view, involving allegations against senior leadership, with exposure across multiple jurisdictions.
Investigations
Investigated the inadvertent hiring of a remote contractor later identified as a foreign-state operative posing as a U.S.-based employee.
Investigated a co-founder dispute centered on allegations that one founder's substance use was affecting the workplace and the treatment of colleagues.
Investigated allegations of inappropriate conduct involving minors against senior staff at a youth-serving organization.
Investigated a senior employee accused of an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate, accompanied by threatening and coercive conduct.
Investigated a senior employee running an undisclosed outside business that posed conflict-of-interest and compliance risks.
Unraveled an expense-and-entertainment fraud scheme run through a short-term-rental front by an employee operator.
Managed a workplace-safety crisis after discovery of an employee's serious undisclosed criminal history and a resulting threat to a company facility, coordinating threat response across local and federal law enforcement.
These matters draw on fluency with forensic-analysis techniques and years working hand-in-glove with engineering teams on fraud, cybersecurity, and data-privacy investigations.
Counseling
Guided a public company through the creation of its DEI program and the public scrutiny that followed (from the 2020 racial-justice moment through the subsequent backlash and ESG reporting), steering decisions to avoid the reputational crises that overtook peer companies.
Led workforce risk-assessment and planning across COVID-19 response, return-to-office, and pay-transparency compliance.
Counseled on a series of sensitive senior-leader separations, including exits arising from credible fraud allegations, performance, and role eliminations, and matters that reached the board.
Advised on reductions in force and corporate restructurings.
Provided M&A employment support across the deal arc: due diligence, pre-integration planning, and post-closing integration.
Counseled investors on M&A workforce matters: investment-side diligence, transaction support, and transition services.
Executive Advisory
Advised leadership on the legal risk of restricting internal communication channels, weighed against the likelihood of walkouts or work stoppages.
Advised on employee petitions to organize unions or works councils.
Advised management on responding to collective employee demand petitions.
Advised on executive talent strategy: hiring, retention, internal mobility, coaching, and exit.
Conducted disciplinary hearings at the school and district level.
Client reflections to come.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
Methodology
The practice is built around the disciplined use of frontier artificial intelligence, not as a chatbot, but as a set of autonomous agents that carry out substantive work under senior-lawyer direction at every stage of a matter.
I completed Harvard's Agentic AI certification in 2026. Building on that training, I deploy frontier models as autonomous agents across a workspace, a file system, and the open internet, handling work that traditionally required administrative assistants, paralegals, junior associates, e-discovery vendors, proofreaders, translators, and exhibit preparers. Each agent operates under my direct control, guided by detailed instruction sets: pages of skills and directions drawn from my own record of practice and judgment. I set the strategy, review every line, and own every word that leaves the firm.
The result is a lean firm that runs without the overhead and rates of a large firm, and without any sacrifice in judgment, capability, or results. You get partner-caliber work without paying for an associate pyramid or the overhead behind it, which is why fees here can be flat or capped, and predictable from the start.
Contact
Interested in working together? Send a note using the form below. Initial conversations are confidential and without obligation.
New York, NY