Joan B. Tucker Fife

Practice Areas

Joan Fife has more than 35 years of experience as a labor and employment litigator. Joan is the managing partner of Winston’s San Francisco office, heads the firm’s San Francisco Labor & Employment Practice, and represents employers throughout the country in class action employment litigation. Clients praise her “very good courtroom demeanor” and describe her as “one of the best attorneys for wage and hour class actions” who is “great at strategy and thinking about the best way to handle things” and knows “when it’s appropriate to be aggressive.”

Joan has had lead responsibility for over 100 class or collective actions across the country. She has defeated conditional certification in nationwide FLSA actions a number of times, including in claims alleging overtime resulting from alleged off-the-clock work, misclassification of employees, and misclassification of independent contractors. In one collective action, she secured more than US$800,000 of her client’s attorneys’ fees from the individual plaintiffs after prevailing on summary judgment on all counts. She has never had a Rule 23 class certified against any of her clients.

Joan represents employers throughout the country in class action employment litigation and has repeatedly been named one of the Daily Journal’s “Top Women Litigators in California” and “Top Labor and Employment Lawyers.” She was also named to the San Francisco Business Times’ “Most Influential Women in the Bay Area” and The Recorder’s list of “Women Leaders in Law.”

For 15 years, Joan has been the lead attorney defending one of the nation’s largest financial institutions in numerous wage and hour class and FLSA collective actions in California and across the country. Joan’s wage and hour class and collective actions have involved misclassification issues, off-the-clock claims, meal and rest break claims, donning and doffing claims, rounding claims, “seating claims,” stand alone PAGA claims, and failure to reimburse claims, among others. She has spent months as trial counsel defending hundreds of individual wage and hour damages claims. She also has extensive experience conducting investigations in heavily regulated industries, defending whistleblower claims, handling significant employment discrimination claims, and representing companies in trade secret/noncompete litigation.

In addition to her current role as managing partner of Winston’s San Francisco office and heading the firm’s San Francisco Labor & Employment Practice, Joan has also served on Winston’s Executive Committee, Partner Compensation Committee, Nominating Committee, Hiring Committee, Diversity Committee and Facilities Committee, and she has been a member of the firm’s Racial Equity Task Force.