Labor and Employment Class Actions

Holland & Knight has extensive experience defending against class actions that are “must-win” cases for our clients because of claims for enormous money damages and requests for injunctions and other findings that threaten core business operations, harm to customer relations and reputation, and in some cases threaten the viability of the company.

Our experience includes litigating class certification itself, conducting class and merits discovery, litigating the merits in large class action cases, negotiating settlements and guiding them through the court approval and notice process and handling appeals involving class certification and related issues. We have handled cases throughout the United States involving a wide variety of claims, such as the Fair Labor Standards Act and its state counterparts, Title VII, ADEA, ADA and state FEP statutes, public accessibility under ADA Title III and state laws, and state common law claims.

We have successfully obtained dismissals of claims and dismissals of class allegations without any discovery in a number of cases. We have also successfully opposed class certification after class discovery in other cases, have obtained summary judgments in still other cases, and have settled other cases cheaply and quickly where that was our client’s goal. We have even successfully filed class actions against classes of employees in some cases, so we know how plaintiffs’ class action lawyers operate.

Litigation. Our approach is to determine the client’s business objectives and then craft a strategy with our client to meet those objectives. We have lawyers in our offices throughout the country who focus their practice on class actions.

Prevention. We work with clients to provide vulnerability assessments and programs to change employment practices to prevent class actions in areas such as wage-hour and discrimination in pay, hiring and promotions.