Practice
I cover the full range of employment needs for companies and executives, from strategic counsel on workforce decisions to crisis advisory and investigations.
How I Can Help
Executive Offers & Separations
I represent executives directly on the two moments that define a career: the offer and the exit. Offer letters, employment agreements, equity and compensation terms, change-of-control and severance protections on the way in. Separation agreements, negotiated departures, restrictive covenants, and the terms of the announcement on the way out. Most executives negotiate these agreements a handful of times in a career. I have sat on the company side of hundreds of them and know exactly where the leverage is.
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 employment policies that keep routine HR decisions from becoming legal exposure.
Reduction in Force
Layoffs and restructurings end to end: selection criteria, disparate-impact review, WARN Act compliance, separation agreements, and the messaging around them. Done right, a reduction in force protects the company legally and reputationally while giving departing employees the dignity the moment deserves. Reductions in force are becoming more common. They do not need to be cruel.
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.
Independent Contractor Strategy
Designing and defending contractor and contingent-workforce models against misclassification risk under shifting federal and state standards.
Labor Relations & Works Councils
Union organizing campaigns, collective bargaining preparation, and works council engagement across U.S. and international operations. I advise management on responding to organizing activity, navigating the legal boundaries of employee communication during campaigns, and structuring labor relations strategies that reduce long-term risk. For global workforces, I counsel on works council consultation obligations and the employment law constraints that apply when business decisions require employee body approval before they can be implemented.
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.
Standing Counsel
Some companies do not need a law firm on speed dial. They need one lawyer who already knows the business, the leadership team, and the history, and who picks up the phone.
Fractional General Counsel
For companies without an in-house employment lawyer, I serve as the employment function: day-to-day counsel to HR and leadership, escalation path for sensitive matters, and the senior judgment a general counsel would otherwise have to hire for.
Outside Employment Counsel on Retainer
For companies with a legal department, I sit alongside it as dedicated employment counsel: the specialist a general counsel calls before a decision is made, not after it goes wrong. Monthly retainers cover ongoing counseling, policy work, and first response when something surfaces.
Predictable Fees
Standing counsel engagements run on a fixed monthly retainer. Discrete matters can be handled on flat or capped fees. In every arrangement, you know what you are paying before the work starts, and what you are paying for is one senior lawyer's time and judgment.
Crisis Advisory & Investigations
When a charge lands, an executive has to go, or a matter risks becoming a headline, I parachute in. Etsy-forged. Proskauer-trained.
Press & Reputation Control
When a matter risks becoming a headline, the legal strategy and the communications strategy have to move together. I advise on what to say, what not to say, and when, coordinating with crisis communications professionals to control the narrative before it controls the company.
Employment Defense
Defending employers against discrimination, harassment, retaliation, wage-and-hour, and wrongful-termination claims: from the first demand letter or agency charge through investigation, negotiation, and resolution.
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.