Employment Law Compliance & Litigation

Hiring, Discipline and Termination

Locke Lord lawyers possess extensive experience helping employers draft and negotiate employment and severance agreements, including those for senior executives in the United States and abroad. We help employers implement hiring procedures, onboarding documentation, and personnel policies and employee handbooks, including codes of conduct and Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblower mechanisms.

When implementing preventative programs, our lawyers provide employers with effective, targeted training. Our training programs include comprehensive lessons on:

• Discrimination avoidance
• Diversity and teamwork essentials
• Creating an optimum workplace environment
• Sexual harassment prevention and mitigation
• Hiring/firing processes
• Discipline implementation
• Wage and hour and union matters

Locke Lord lawyers regularly advise employers regarding privacy issues, drug testing, workplace violence, reasonable accommodations for disabilities, religious customs and practice, and the interpretation of paid time off and leave statutes.

We also are seasoned in guiding employers through the employee separation process, whether the separation is due to misconduct, poor performance, layoff or early retirement programs. Our lawyers routinely assist companies in addressing the legal aspects of RIFs, including non-discrimination issues and compliance with federal and state layoff notice requirements.

U.S. Immigration

From multinational corporations transferring key personnel from overseas to small businesses wanting to hire foreign nationals with particular technical skills, companies turn to Locke Lord for quality assistance on immigration matters. We work closely with employers to develop plans to select the most appropriate U.S. visa category by taking into account the needs of the company, the education and experience of the candidate, and the time and numerical threshold and likelihood of success.

We give clients our personal attention and practical guidance throughout the complex visa qualification process, including the:

• Initial applications filed with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services of the Department of Homeland Security
• Increasingly difficult procedures for obtaining visas at U.S. Embassies and Consulates across the world
• Frequently complicated experience of entering U.S. borders
• Newly challenging worksite enforcement issues facing today's employers

Employment Litigation

From Locke Lord's U.S. footprint and our office in the United Kingdom as well as our colleagues in the Employment Law Alliance, our labor and employment litigators act quickly and effectively to defend employment claims in any state in the United States and any industrialized nation in the world. We provide clients with experience in courtroom advocacy combined with our knowledge of complex procedural and substantive intricacies of labor and employment law. Our reach extends to all venues — federal, state, mediation and arbitral — and encompasses multidistrict, class and collective action lawsuits and appeals.

Our experience covers a variety of employment litigation matters, including:

• Single and multi-plaintiff and class and collective action discrimination, harassment and retaliation actions, including claims involving age, disability, gender, marital status, pregnancy, genetic information, national origin, race, religion and sexual orientation allegations
• FMLA, ADA and other leave or accommodation claims
• Non-compete, non-solicit, breach of fiduciary duty, non-disclosure, unfair competition and theft of trade secrets cases
• Wage and hour claims (including minimum wage, overtime, break time and vacation pay issues)
• Whistleblower actions
• Failure to hire as well as wrongful termination allegations