Hirschfeld Kraemer LLP

Firm Details: 

Managing Partners: Stephen J Hirschfeld, Glen E Kraemer

Number of partners: 11

Number of lawyers: 28

Languages: English, French, Spanish, German 

Firm Overview: 

Since 1997, Hirschfeld Kraemer has been focused exclusively on labor and employment law, building a client-centric business model that offers clients global reach and market-leading innovative solutions.

Over the past two years, as its clients faced challenges ranging from the pandemic to Black Lives Matter, Hirschfeld Kraemer lawyers provided practical guidance where the law offered few answers. The firm created a comprehensive plan to address workplace safety, and helped clients who faced downsizing, office closures, and partial re-openings with practical advice on how to accomplish their objectives with minimal legal and organizational risk. Clients looked to the firm for guidance addressing employee political activism and disputes arising on and off the workplace.

Work focuses on three equally important areas: legal compliance, HR problem-solving, and dispute resolution. Hirschfeld Kraemer lawyers are highly experienced in conducting compliance audits, developing HR policies and practices, providing management legal training, and successfully defending lawsuits. The issues its lawyers confront include workplace privacy, discrimination and harassment, wage-hour compliance, pay equity, workplace violence, unfair competition/trade secrets, union organizing, collective bargaining, immigration, workforce reductions, and executive employment agreements.

Advising clients across a wide range of industries, including technology, banking, healthcare, hospitality, and agriculture, Hirschfeld Kraemer lawyers also have special expertise working with the increasingly complex and ever-changing issues facing colleges and universities.

Hirschfeld Kraemer also provides clients access to global HR expertise, by serving as the exclusive California representative of the Employment Law Alliance, the world’s largest and most prestigious network of labour and employment lawyers from over 100 countries. Working closely with Employment Law Alliance colleagues, Hirschfeld Kraemer lawyers routinely address multi-state and multi-national issues to provide seamless, cost-effective services around the globe.

MAIN AREAS OF PRACTICE: 

Labour & Employment Law — Compliance, Consulting & Training:

• Outside labour counsel for several leading solid waste and recycling companies, providing advice and representation on union organizing, collective bargaining, strikes, picketing, and arbitrations

• Provides services to HR executives and in-house counsel for leading technology companies

• Delivers legal training for managers for organizations in a wide range of industries

• In response to dramatic legislative changes to sexual harassment law in the wake of the #MeToo movement, conducts compliance training throughout California, including engagement by Anita Hill’s Hollywood Commission to assist in creating best practice investigation and response protocols, and help create certification training for its member organizations

• Regularly retained by AmLaw 100 firms to provide strategic advice on all HR legal issues triggered by mergers and acquisitions, including advising on the impact on unionized personnel, conducting due diligence audits on target companies, drafting executive employment agreements, NDAs, non-competes, and various retention programs

Labour & Employment Law — Litigation: 

• Provides defense in a wide variety of discrimination, harassment, and wrongful termination lawsuits for leading employers

• Regularly represents businesses faced with both single plaintiff and class action lawsuits

• Successfully prosecuted claims against former employees on behalf of both corporations and non-profits for misappropriating trade secrets and unfair competition

Internal Investigations: 

• Regularly called upon to provide neutral investigations for some of the world’s leading corporations and universities involving allegations of workplace misconduct including harassment, violence, whistleblowing, and retaliation

• Conducted the internal investigation at one of America’s most prestigious venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, involving a highly publicized gender discrimination claim brought by former partner, Ellen Pao

Higher Education Law: 

• Assists universities in labour matters involving union organizing and collective bargaining

• Conducts harassment and sexual assault investigations at major universities

• Serves as outside general counsel for Pomona College, providing daily advice on a wide variety of faculty, staff, and student matters

• Advises and trains higher education institutions around the country on Title IX, discrimination and harassment, campus violence, and conducting campus investigations

International Work: 

• Offers EU data privacy compliance audit services and advice on data retention and access

• Provides immigration/global migration services for multi-national employers

• Oversees global workplace reorganizations, layoffs, and redundancies