The following is an excerpt from Practice Perspectives: Vault's Guide to Legal Practice Areas.
Felicia Davis is a partner in Paul Hastings’ employment law department and is based in the firm’s Los Angeles and San Francisco offices. Her practice focuses on pay equity and discrimination class actions as well as systemic government investigations. She has led the defense of some of the largest matters across the country. Her clients span all industries, with an emphasis in media, entertainment, and technology.
Felicia also represents employers in other employment law matters, including single plaintiff pay equity, discrimination, retaliation, harassment, and religious accommodation cases. She handles single-plaintiff and class action wage and hour matters. In addition, Felicia represents clients in background check litigation under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, conducts workplace investigations, and handles labor grievances and collective bargaining.
In addition to litigation, Felicia regularly advises employers on their employment policies and procedures, including policies on employee background checks, paid sick leave, and wage and hour issues, and provides anti-harassment training to management and executives. She works with employers to review and analyze their hiring, compensation, and promotion practices for equity and legal compliance and advises on ESG reporting and diversity programs.
Describe your practice area and what it entails.
As an employment lawyer, I work with some of the country’s largest employers to advise on all aspects of the employment relationship. This means I help employers resolve disputes that involve everything from hiring, promotions, pay, and wage and hour issues to concerns about working conditions, difficult leave and workplace accommodation questions, and employee terminations. Employment lawyers also help employers protect their trade secrets by preventing employees from taking confidential information from one company to another. Beyond litigation and disputes, employment lawyers are involved in advice and counseling work, such as helping companies develop best practices for promotion or performance systems, creating more diverse and inclusive workplaces, and advising on layoffs and employment reductions.
What types of clients do you represent?
Companies of all sizes and in every industry grapple with employment law issues, so employment lawyers tend to represent a broad range of clients. Given that I primarily work in California, I represent many employers in the entertainment, media, and technology industries, but my practice is very broad, and I have represented companies in manufacturing, retail, and other sectors as well. Some of my more recent clients include The Walt Disney Company, Nike, Google and ByteDance (TikTok).
What types of cases/deals do you work on?
We are a Chambers Band 1 employment practice, so clients tend to come to us for their most business-critical employment issues. In my own practice, I tend to work on high-stakes discrimination class actions, whether that involves pay discrimination or disputes over promotion practices and hiring. These are important cases that target an employer’s employment practices. For example, I have handled cases involving allegations that an employer has paid women less than men for the same work or others in which employees from historically underrepresented groups are paid less or placed in lower-level roles than those in historical majority groups.
These types of cases are heavily statistics-driven, and I often work closely with labor economists and other experts to analyze pay and promotion data to not only defend the case but also to determine whether any existing issues should be corrected.
How did you choose this practice area?
Before law school, I worked for five years in a management training program for a large industrial supply distribution firm where I ran different parts of the business. I was involved in operations from top to bottom, from hiring and performance management to terminations. I thought that employment law was something that I understood well and found interesting, and I knew it would give me many options to pursue in my legal career, whether it was at a BigLaw firm like Paul Hastings, a smaller boutique firm, or in-house.
I specifically focused on discrimination class actions after I started working on these cases early in my legal career. I enjoy working on these cases because they are high-stakes and critical for our clients to defend, and in working on them, I get to help employers ensure their practices are fair and equitable. As I mentioned before, these cases involve a lot of statistical analysis, so I also enjoy the fact that I get to exercise the math part of my brain in addition to the lawyer part.
What is a “typical” day like and/or what are some common tasks you perform?
There are no “typical days” as an employment lawyer. I’m often working on multiple complex cases during the same day, constantly switching between different cases and clients. However, some of the common tasks I perform involve advising clients about difficult HR matters, preparing witnesses for depositions, and working with experts on data analysis. At Paul Hastings, we focus on client service and collaboration, so I am often working closely with my team—including mentoring junior attorneys from day one—to develop and implement litigation strategies.
What training, classes, experience, or skills development would you recommend to someone who wishes to enter your practice area?
Strong writing skills are important to being a good litigator in general, so experience in any type of written advocacy work will be key to success. Specifically, because we tend to interact with and interview a wide range of witnesses, from the CEO of a company to an assembly worker on a manufacturing line, it is critical that attorneys in the employment space can communicate well and empathize with people from a variety of different backgrounds.
As for classes that have stuck with me, the class I took in law school that has been the most applicable to my work as an employment litigator was a Deposition Skills clinic. I still use the techniques I learned in that class when I take depositions to this day.
What is the most challenging aspect of practicing in this area?
This challenge may not be unique to employment law, but as a lawyer, you are often asked to help clients solve problems that existed long before you were involved or have not been addressed properly. The facts are what they are, and some-times our job is to help clients execute on the “least bad” option. This requires an understanding of what’s important to the individual client in that moment. Not every client has the same business needs and priorities, so the challenge becomes identifying my client’s largest priorities and figuring out how to prioritize and accomplish their most important ones when achieving all their goals is impossible. This is also a lot of fun.
What do you like best about your practice area?
I really enjoy helping my clients solve issues before they devolve into a dispute or litigation so that, hopefully, the employee and the employer can find a resolution that works for both. I also really enjoy working with companies to evaluate and, at times, modify their business practices to create fair and equitable workplaces and deliver real and impactful change for them and their employees.
I also love the fact that I get to work with lots of types of companies. As I mentioned, virtually every company in every sector will have employment needs and issues, and I love learning about different industries and types of business that I’ve never worked with before. It’s amazing how many companies are critical to our day-to-day lives that fly below the radar. It is so much fun to learn what they do and help them operate at their best.
What misconceptions exist about your practice area?
A misconception about defense-side employment lawyers is that you are working to protect bad actors that allow harmful and discriminatory practices to exist. That has not been my experience at all. Throughout my time practicing in this area, I’ve had a significant impact on ensuring that companies create, modify, and uphold policies that are more inclusive and equitable, as well as those that safeguard equal opportunities for all. Our impact is perhaps even bigger than that of a plaintiff’s lawyer since, through our work, we build and maintain relationships with our clients that give us the unique ability to help drive meaningful change. They trust us, and when we give advice, they listen.
How do you see this practice area evolving in the future?
Growing adoption and implementation of AI will drive a lot of what we do in the employment space in the future. More companies are integrating AI into their employment practices, including hiring, performance evaluation and promotion decisions, even terminations, and I don’t anticipate that this will slow down anytime soon. This is a seismic shift in the employment legal landscape, bringing the potential for significant disputes and precedent-setting litigation, as well as
changes in the laws and regulation that govern this space. I think young law students and lawyers who are interested in learning about and understanding AI, as well as how this technology will interact with existing anti-discrimination and privacy laws, will find employment law to be a field that is interesting and open for them to make an impact.