The Employment Law Summit: Palo Alto

Angela brings more than 25 years of transactional, litigation, operations, and compliance experience in a wide range of highly regulated industries. As General Counsel at Wing, she focuses on launching drone delivery in communities around the globe. She has been described as a business-first, collaborative strategist with a track record of leading through complexity and driving transformational agendas.  Prior to Wing, Angela was an Associate General Counsel at Tesla, responsible for global compliance. Angela’s extensive experience also includes serving as the interim General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Atlanta Housing, senior commercial attorney at MCI WorldCom (acquired by Verizon), and senior director of business and legal affairs at Motown Records.

Angela earned a JD from Harvard Law School, MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where she’s now an instructor in the Wharton Communications Program. She has a BS in business from the University of North Carolina, where she was awarded a John Motley Morehead Scholarship, UNC’s most prestigious academic and leadership scholarship.

Morgan Taylor is a Partner in the San Francisco office and heads the Mintz Group’s Executive Diligence practice. She specializes in managing cross-border investigations into potential partners, transaction targets and executive or board placements to support pre-deal and pre-hire due diligence. She also oversees investigations for law firms and employers related to issues such as employment disputes, fraud investigations and allegations of workplace misconduct.

Prior to joining the Mintz Group in 2014, Morgan worked for a start-up due diligence firm, where she conducted investigations for private and public sector clients in dispute-related cases, including international asset tracing and link analysis to uncover fraud. She is also an experienced researcher, with a focus on financial crimes, anti-money laundering, counterterrorism and Middle East history and politics.

Morgan has an M.A. in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and a B.A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in International Affairs.

Rina Wang advises on a broad portfolio of legal matters as Senior Counsel at Peet’s Coffee. Since 2019, she has also trained companies on best practices for managing within the law and respectful workplaces. She previously worked as general counsel of a global software company, where she settled a federal misappropriation of trade secrets case against a former employee.

Ms. Proctor is an experienced HR leader with a career of extensive collaboration as a trusted partner and advisor to achieve articulated business goals and ultimately the company’s mission. With broad business knowledge, HR acumen, and practical professionalism she brings a deep background in designing and implementing human capital strategy to realize the full potential of developing both the employees and the organization. Her thoughtful approach is recognized as building and fostering engaged work environments and imperative in risk assessment discussions. Ms. Proctor has served at Gritstone as the Head of People since July 2021. Prior to joining Gritstone, Ms. Proctor served in Head of Human Resources’ positions for companies including Energy Recovery, PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), Mizuho OSI, and ATPA (Associated Third Party Administrators). In the last fifteen years her career has traversed five industries, however, she began with a sixteen-year tenure at Marriott International progressing through HR tactical roles and then leadership positions spanning 4 divisions and 6 business units. Ms. Proctor is a Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR), secured her Professional in Human Resources California Certification (PHR-CA), earned an MBA from the University of Phoenix, and a BA in Sociology from the University of Utah.

Elaisha Nandrajog represents employers in a wide range of matters in state and federal court as well as before administrative agencies, providing preventative counsel that helps successfully resolve litigious matters. She has experience defending companies in single-plaintiff and multi-plaintiff cases against claims of wrongful termination, discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and failure to accommodate. Her work involves complex wage and hour class actions as well as representative actions brought under California’s Private Attorneys General Act.

In addition to her litigation practice, Elaisha advises employers and managers on hiring, screening, retention, and termination practices as well as various wage and hour compliance issues. She is also involved in the development and review of company policies to identify risk and ensure compliance.

Elaisha also provides due diligence review of target companies in mergers and acquisitions and has conducted internal employment investigations for public and private employers throughout the Bay Area. Her commercial litigation experience includes work on breach of contract, fraud, and unfair competition and interference claims.

Jennifer Coleman is a trial lawyer with an active practice in intellectual property, labor and employment, and complex litigation cases. Her experience includes patent damages, trade secret misappropriation, remediation, single plaintiff and class action wage and hour controversies, unfair competition and employee mobility matters.

Jen also handles employment disputes involving claims of wrongful termination, discrimination, harassment, and retaliation; leaves of absences; employment policies and procedures; employee discipline; hiring practices; workplace violence; and fraud relating to complex financial transactions. She regularly advises and counsels employers of all sizes on various day-to-day legal issues.

Andrew Shalauta is a partner with over 15 years of experience in practicing employment law and specializes in labor and employment litigation, and advice and counsel, for private employers, public entities, and educational institutions. Andrew focuses his practice on providing legal counsel to all levels of company management, board of directors, and training for supervisors relating to compliance with state and federal laws concerning employment, advising on company policies to reduce the risk of litigation, providing solutions for best employment practices in the workplace, and representing employers in all aspects of employment litigation. Andrew defends employers against individual lawsuits, multi-party and collective actions, as well as numerous class actions involving complex employment law claims.

Vincent R. Fisher serves as Co-Leader of the Class and Collective Action Practice Group in O’Hagan Meyer’s San Francisco office. Mr. Fisher is considered a thought leader and a masterful litigator in the wage-and-hour litigation sphere. His experience includes “bet the business” nationwide collective actions and class actions presenting novel issues of first impression. He has shaped and executed successful trial strategies across a broad range of industries and settings, including complex litigation featuring unionized workforces as well as sensitive litigation implicating national security. Before law school, Mr. Fisher served in the United States Marine Corps. He is a veteran of the Iraq campaign. Outside the law, he enjoys Crossfit as well as spending time with his wife and three sons.

Chris Stecher is a shareholder with Keesal, Young & Logan. Chris represents employers in all aspects of litigation at the trial and appellate level, as well as in arbitration. Chris handles cases involving wrongful termination, harassment, retaliation, discrimination, breach of contract, and unfair competition, as well as wage and hour class actions, PAGA actions and other representative actions. Chris also regularly advises clients in areas such as employee discipline, compensation and benefits, non-compete laws, wage and hour issues, leaves of absence, and general compliance with local, state, and federal laws. Chris graduated from Stanford University in 1996. After teaching in Chicago’s inner city, Chris attended law school and graduated magna cum laude from the University of San Francisco School of Law in 2001.

Sharon O. Rossi is a shareholder at Rogers Joseph O’Donnell PC. Ms. Rossi’s practice is focused on defending complex cases in state and federal courts, with emphasis on class and representative actions, including Private Attorneys’ General Act (PAGA) claims. She has experience handling all aspects of litigation from inception through trial, as well as appeals.

Ms. Rossi prides herself on listening to her client’s business needs to direct them to the best strategy based on their objectives. Over her years of practice, Ms. Rossi has learned that successful client relationships depend on clear communication, strong collaboration and empathetic listening. Collaborative and collegial in her approach to all matters, Ms. Rossi is nevertheless a fierce advocate for her clients.

In addition to her litigation practice, Ms. Rossi has extensive experience counseling employers on a wide array of matters, including leaves of absence, disability accommodations, terminations and harassment complaints. She also works with employers to ensure their policies are legally compliant and conducts investigations in response to employee complaints of alleged unlawful practices.

Ms. Rossi also defends employers before federal and state administrative agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the California Civil Rights Department (formerly the DFEH), the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement and the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board.

Currently a trustee for the Alpha Epsilon Phi Foundation, Ms. Rossi previously served on the board of the San Francisco Affiliate of Dress for Success, an international non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the economic independence of disadvantaged women.

With over 15 years of experience in senior HR roles, Lindsay Harris has led impactful HR transformations. At Fitness & Wellness Professional Services, she managed an $8M staffing budget and grew the company from 500 to 1,600 employees. Now at Interstate Equities Corporation, she oversees HR strategy, talent acquisition, compensation, benefits, and regulatory compliance. Lindsay specializes in strategic leadership, talent management, compensation strategies, and organizational development. She has a proven track record of enhancing operational efficiency, leading teams, and aligning HR with business goals.

Yesenia Gallegos is the co-office managing partner for McDermott’s Southern California offices and a partner in the Firm’s Employment Practice Group. She has over two decades of litigation experience representing employers in wage and hour class actions, Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) class actions, California Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA) representative actions, embezzlement disputes, restrictive covenants, and also defends against discrimination, harassment, and retaliation claims. She is also an experienced counselor who provides strategic advice to employers and the C-Suite on mitigating risk in mergers and acquisitions, pay equity, executive compensation and executive employment agreements, employment investigations, enforcement or avoidance of restrictive covenants, managing leaves of absence, and reductions in force.

Stacey joined KYL in 1991 and is a shareholder in its Long Beach office. Stacey currently serves on the firm’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Stacey’s practice focuses on representing and advising securities broker-dealers and banks. She has successfully represented financial institutions in jury trials, bench trials, class actions, regulatory proceedings and hundreds of arbitrations.

Stacey has tried or arbitrated to conclusion more than 50 cases (including jury trials and bench trials). She regularly appears in state and federal courts and in securities arbitrations before the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Stacey has tried cases involving allegations of fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, churning, unsuitability, negligence, negligent supervision, and violations of state and federal law. She also has advised and defended firms and registered representatives in regulatory inquiries initiated by FINRA, the New York Stock Exchange and the California Department of Corporations. Her work includes defending individual claims and class actions, and she was part of a team that tried a 250-member class action to a jury verdict.

Stacey’s practice also includes privacy law and advising clients on data security. Stacey is certified by the International Association of Privacy Professionals in United States private sector privacy law (CIPP/US) and European Union privacy and data protection law (CIPP/E). She also is a Certified Information Privacy Manager (CIPM) and Certified Information Privacy Technologist (CIPT). Her work includes defending clients accused of violating various privacy laws, assessing clients’ legal and regulatory compliance with applicable privacy laws, including the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, Regulation S-P, the California Financial Information Privacy Act, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the Stored Communications Act (SCA), and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Stacey also represents creditors in bankruptcy proceedings. She advises clients on how to structure and maintain commercial relationships with debtors who may be on the verge of, or who have filed a petition for, bankruptcy. Her practice includes helping her clients keep money the debtor paid them in the months leading up to the bankruptcy petition and making sure her clients are paid to the maximum extent possible before the debtor is discharged. She defends creditors who have been accused of violating the automatic stay, and defends creditors who have been accused of receiving preferential payments from debtor in the months before the bankruptcy petition.

Deneen C. Howell, a transactional lawyer, is a highly skilled negotiator adept at guiding her clients to achieve what they’re worth and obtain the flexibility they need to meet their goals. Her practice includes helping authors secure book deals; advising current and former government officials, senior executives, public speakers, broadcasters and journalists (many of whom also are authors) in their professional pursuits; and counseling privately held businesses and non-profit organizations in employment and publishing-related matters. Deneen also chairs the firm’s Budget Committee. She is Co-Chair of both Williams & Connolly’s Transactions and Business Counseling practice group as well as its Employment Counseling practice group. Deneen regularly advises current and former government officials in connection with their professional, academic and publishing endeavors, including Presidents, Cabinet Members, White House officials, Senators, Representatives, Department of Justice, Department of State and other agency officials as well as representatives of state and local government, whether it be serving as a consultant, senior advisor, board member or senior executive to corporations, joining a law firm, writing their memoirs, running major foundations, academic institutions or joining faculties, undertaking paid speaking engagements, serving as contributors to media outlets, or some combination of the above. In her publishing practice, apart from non-fiction, Deneen also has a thriving practice representing thriller-writers as well as authors of literary fiction for adult and young readers and illustrated children’s books. Deneen has an extensive executive compensation practice where she represents top executives as well as fiduciary and advisory board members of public and privately-held companies. In addition, she regularly advises senior executives leading colleges and universities, major non-profits, trade associations, professional sports organizations, and media companies. In her media practice, she represents on-air and off-air talent, including anchors, correspondents, reporters, contributors, writers, editors and producers.

In addition, Deneen advises corporate clients on a wide array of legal issues, including restrictive covenants, corporate governance, employment-related internal investigations and publishing. In 2018 and 2019, Chambers USA recognized Deneen as a member of Williams & Connolly’s “renowned” media and entertainment practice. Chambers notes that the team is expert in the publishing field and “sought out by leading authors and politicians to negotiate book deals.” Deneen also has been honored as one of Savoy magazine’s Most Influential Black Lawyers (2018) and has been selected as one of the top 500 lawyers overall (Lawdragon, 2018-2023).
Deneen joined Williams & Connolly in 1998 and has been a partner since 2006. She has served as a member of the Board of Governors of the Folger Shakespeare Library (2010-20), and currently serves on the Board of Directors of The Fuller Project, the White House Historical Association and Georgetown Day School.
When advising authors, Deneen helps to craft book proposals, pitch book ideas and negotiate resulting publishing and ancillary agreements. Throughout her practice, Deneen has represented such non-fiction authors as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senator Tammy Duckworth, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Amanda Knox, Congressman John Lewis, Col. Oliver North, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and David Plouffe. Her skills also range beyond political memoirs and into the literary world where she represents fiction authors, including Alex Berenson, Mary Higgins Clark, Khaled Hosseini, and James Patterson, and children’s book authors as well as musicians, restauranteurs and other public figures, including Lidia Bastianich, Jewel, Herbie Hancock and Barbra Streisand. In her executive compensation practice, Deneen has represented C-suite executives, general counsels, fiduciary board members and advisory board members at organizations such as Airbnb, AT&T, Axios, Bank of America, BitFury, the Brunswick Group, Discovery, FleishmanHillard, Hilton Hotels, Google, Lyft, PepsiCo, Politico, RLJ Equity Partners, Snap, Ralph Lauren, Uber and Viacom. Deneen’s higher education practice has included senior executive employment agreement and head coach negotiations for at such institutions American University, Baylor University, George Washington University, Georgetown, Harvard, Case Western Reserve, University of California – Davis, Columbia University, Drexel

University, Franklin & Marshall College, George Washington University, Kalamazoo College, Meharry Medical College, Morehouse, University of Pennsylvania, Pitzer, University of Southern California (USC), Spelman College, Tulane, the University of Miami and Vanderbilt. In her practice advising executives as they join not-for-profit organizations, Deneen has represented senior executives serving the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, the Huntington Library, the March of Dimes, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the ACLA, ASCAP, the Business Roundtable, the Private Equity Growth and Capital Council and the Managed Funds Association. Her representation of senior executives of professional sports teams has included the Baltimore Ravens, Golden State Warriors, the Houston Rockets and the Philadelphia 76ers. In her media practice, Deneen regularly negotiates employment agreements for her clients at ABC, CBS, CNBC, CNN, Discovery, ESPN, FOX, MSNBC, NBC, NPR and WETA. Deneen also represents print journalists such as Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles. Deneen’s pro bono work has centered on contract negotiations for, and advice and counsel to various non-profit organizations, including the National Military Families Association and the Air Force Aid Society and the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Fund (VVMF). Her pro bono work for the Folger Shakespeare Library led to an invitation to join its Board of Governors. Born in Philadelphia, Deneen grew up in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and graduated cum laude from Yale University in 1993. She spent a year working in the New York District Attorney’s office as an investigation coordinator in the child abuse bureau before going to Stanford Law School, where she received her J.D. and was President of the Stanford Law Review. After law school, Deneen became corporate counsel to the Times Mirror Company, a Los Angeles-based news and information company whose holdings included the Los Angeles Times. There her responsibilities included employment-related matters, mergers and acquisitions, intellectual property, commercial speech, and First Amendment issues.

Robert Hinckley is Managing Shareholder of Buchalter’s Denver office and Co-Chair of the Firm’s Litigation Group. Mr. Hinckley practices in both Colorado and California and is also a member of the Los Angeles and Orange County offices. A former prosecutor, Mr. Hinckley is an aggressive and effective trial lawyer, with first-chair experience in more than forty jury trials and more than twenty bench trials and arbitration hearings. Mr. Hinckley has litigated and tried cases in Colorado, California, Florida, Texas, Delaware and elsewhere for a diverse group of business clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small and medium-sized privately held companies.

Mr. Hinckley is a trusted adviser who applies practical solutions to the complex business challenges facing his clients on a daily basis. Mr. Hinckley specializes in commercial and corporate litigation, which includes prosecuting and defending all manner of contractual disputes, including partnership/LLC disputes, stockholder actions and business separations. Mr. Hinckley also commonly litigates real estate disputes, civil fraud, defamation, breach of fiduciary duty, tortious interference and other business-centered torts. Mr. Hinckley likewise has a significant employment practice on behalf of employers, to include risk management and litigation counseling as well as serving as litigation counsel in the areas of trade secrets, non-competition and non-solicitation agreements, wrongful discharge, harassment, discrimination and retaliation.

Mr. Hinckley also frequently litigates complex product contamination matters on a national and international basis on behalf of specialty insurance carriers through subrogation, related to large losses in North America, South America, Asia and Europe.

Mr. Hinckley currently serves as Vice President of the Executive Committee for the Colorado Defense Lawyers Association, the preeminent legal organization in Colorado dedicated to the defense of civil actions and the promotion of fairness and integrity in the civil justice system.

Jonathan Wong is a seasoned attorney focused on employment and immigration law. With extensive experience in employment litigation, he defends employers against wrongful termination, discrimination and sexual harassment, and other employment-related claims. He also counsels employers on personnel disputes, employee discipline, demotions, terminations, workplace safety, and OSHA compliance. His immigration practice consists of advising and representing companies on hiring foreign nationals, immigration strategies, and compliance with U.S. immigration laws. He is also experienced in the transfer of foreign executives, managers, and other key personnel to American branches of foreign companies. Committed to pro bono work, Jonathan has received numerous awards for his legal services to the underserved.