Employment Litigation Experience: Court-Tested, Deposition-Tested, Motion-Tested

Phillips & Phillips & Associates is a plaintiff-side employment law firm that represents employees exclusively and has never represented an employer, corporation, or management in any matter. Since 2011, the firm has litigated approximately 2,000 employment cases in court, recovered more than $360 million for employees, and appeared before more than 110 United States District Judges and more than 70 United States Magistrate Judges.

Phillips & Associates combines the resources and litigation capacity of a substantial plaintiff-side employment practice with partner-led, boutique-style representation. In career-impacting employment cases, litigation leverage often matters long before trial. The firm's litigation record and reputation with employers, management-side defense firms, and insurers can help create leverage to resolve matters privately and confidentially when that serves the client's interests, while protecting the client's career and reputation.

A law firm's litigation record matters even when a case never reaches trial. Employers and their defense lawyers evaluate whether the employee's attorneys are prepared to continue through discovery, depositions, motion practice, trial, and appeal if the matter does not resolve. This page documents Phillips & Associates' court experience, significant employment case recoveries, federal bench experience, management-side defense firms opposed, jury verdicts, appellate decisions, and published employment-law precedent.

Employment Litigation Record at a Glance

• Significant case outcomes. The firm’s record includes 31 individual employment matters resolved at $1 million or more, including 13 at $2 million or more.
• Federal bench experience. More than 110 United States District Judges and more than 70 United States Magistrate Judges, including nearly every currently sitting District Judge in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York.
• Second Circuit precedent. Vasquez v. Empress Ambulance adopted cat’s paw retaliation in the Second Circuit and extended it to a nonsupervisory employee. It has been cited more than 200 times.
• Jury trial and appellate experience. The firm has tried employment cases to jury verdict in federal and state court and defended favorable verdicts through post-trial motions and appeal.
• Management-side defense firms.   Phillips & Associates has opposed more than 550 management-side defense firms, including Jackson Lewis in more than 430 matters and Littler Mendelson in more than 210 matters.

How Does Litigation Reputation Affect the Value of an Employment Case?

Most employment cases resolve before trial, but litigation reputation can materially affect the leverage behind a resolution.

Employers and insurers price risk. That price goes up when the employee’s lawyers understand the evidence, preserve the digital record, identify the witnesses, develop the damages, prepare the depositions, and are prepared for summary judgment. It goes down when they cannot. The number that matters to a defendant is not what the employee asks for. It is what the defendant thinks the case is worth if it keeps going.

Phillips & Associates evaluates every matter as if litigation may become necessary. That does not mean every case should be filed or tried. It means the case is built so the client has real options, including negotiation, mediation, an agency proceeding, litigation, trial, or a private resolution, depending on the facts and on what the client actually wants.

Leverage is usually created long before trial. It is created when the employer sees that the employee’s lawyers understand the timeline, the documents, the witnesses, the damages, the power dynamics, and the weak points in the employer’s explanation.

Career-impacting employment cases require facts, evidence, damages analysis, litigation judgment, and lawyers prepared to continue if the employer will not resolve the matter fairly.

Employment Litigation Experience by the Numbers

Significant Employment Case Recoveries

Aggregate recovery figures tell only part of the story. Phillips & Associates' record includes 31 individual employment matters resolved at $1 million or more, including 13 at $2 million or more.

These results reflect the firm's experience developing and valuing career-impacting employment cases involving sexual harassment, retaliation, discrimination, whistleblower claims, executive misconduct, and other workplace disputes.

Past results do not guarantee future outcomes

For the firm’s full record of verdicts and settlements by amount and practice area, see Case Results at /results/.

Employment Litigation Across Industries

Employment cases are shaped by the workplace in which they arise. A sexual harassment or retaliation case involving a global financial institution may require different evidence, witnesses, damages analysis, and discovery than a case involving a hospital, law firm, restaurant, technology company, or closely held business.

Phillips & Associates has litigated employment matters across a broad range of industries and institutions, including:

• Financial services, banking, insurance, and asset management: compensation and bonus records, compliance communications, trading-floor communications, deferred compensation, and arbitration issues. 
• Healthcare, hospitals, and life sciences: credentialing, scheduling, patient-safety complaints, regulatory concerns, medical leave, accommodations, and physician or executive authority. 
• Law firms, accounting, and professional services: partnership authority, advancement and promotion decisions, staffing records, compensation, billable-hour data, and internal investigations. 
• Media, entertainment, sports, and the arts: executive and principal misconduct, confidentiality issues, informal decision-making, reputational concerns, and communications outside traditional workplace channels. 
• Technology and telecommunications: Slack, Teams, internal messaging, equity and vesting, founder conduct, compensation, and rapidly changing reporting structures. 
• Hospitality, food service, and retail: scheduling, shifts, tips and commissions, manager authority, owner conduct, and witnesses who may leave the workplace quickly. 
• Real estate, construction, and building services: site-level supervision, contractors and subcontractors, joint-employer issues, and records maintained by multiple entities. 
• Education, nonprofits, government, and public agencies: formal complaint procedures, board or institutional oversight, civil-service requirements, public-employer rules, and administrative processes. 

The firm has obtained seven-figure employment recoveries involving defendants in banking, law, accounting, insurance, manufacturing, healthcare, live entertainment, technology, consumer products, and building services.

Across industries, the recurring questions are often the same: who had authority, who knew what was happening, what evidence exists, and what changed after the employee spoke up.

Workplace Power Dynamics Across Industries

There is a pattern in these matters that has nothing to do with industry. Many of the firm's matters involve allegations against people with authority over the employee's job.

Managing partners. Founders. Portfolio managers. Attending physicians. Restaurant owners. Executives who controlled schedules, assignments, compensation, promotions, references, and in some cases immigration sponsorship.

When the accused person is a named partner, founder, executive, or other senior decision-maker, the employer may face an internal conflict between investigating the complaint and protecting someone important to the organization. And when the employer is small enough that the owner is the company, there is no separate authority to appeal to at all.

Cases like these are built around three questions. Who had power. Who knew. What changed afterward. That is the work the firm has organized itself around, and it is why the discovery in these matters targets decision-makers and reporting structures rather than only the incident itself.

The firm’s approach to cases involving supervisors, executives, and business owners is described further on Why Phillips & Associates.

Federal Court Experience

Phillips & Associates attorneys have appeared before more than 110 United States District Judges and more than 70 United States Magistrate Judges across the federal courts of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, including nearly every currently sitting District Judge in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York.

That experience comes from representing employees as counsel of record in employment litigation, including discovery, depositions, motion practice, settlement conferences, trials, and appeals.

Where Phillips & Associates Litigates Employment Cases

Phillips & Associates has litigated more than 1,800 employment cases in court, a record the firm describes as approximately 2,000 litigated cases.

Much of that litigation has taken place in the Southern District of New York and Eastern District of New York, as well as in New York State Supreme Court throughout New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County.

The firm's court experience also includes the Northern District of New York, District of New Jersey, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, District of Connecticut, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Phillips & Associates also represents employees in arbitrations before AAA and JAMS and in administrative proceedings before the EEOC, New York State Division of Human Rights, and New York City Commission on Human Rights. Those proceedings are separate from the firm's court-litigation count.

On the ground, that experience includes employment litigation in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester Counties, as well as federal matters in White Plains and Central Islip and matters in Newark and Trenton, New Jersey.

Management-Side Defense Firms We Litigate Against

Phillips & Associates has litigated against more than 550 distinct management-side defense firms representing banks, hospitals, law firms, hotel and restaurant groups, media companies, technology companies, universities, and public agencies.

The two firms it has opposed most often are Jackson Lewis, in more than 430 matters, and Littler Mendelson, in more than 210. It also litigates regularly against Ogletree Deakins, Seyfarth Shaw, Morgan Lewis & Bockius, Proskauer Rose, Epstein Becker Green, Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani, Kaufman Dolowich, Lewis Brisbois, Wilson Elser, Greenberg Traurig, Fox Rothschild, and the New York City Law Department.

Defense counsel and insurers evaluate the facts of a case, and they also evaluate whether the employee’s lawyers are prepared to keep going if settlement does not happen. That second assessment is usually made before the first mediation, and it is made on the basis of what the firm has done before.

Litigating Against High-Profile Defendants

Some of the firm’s matters involve defendants the public already knows.

Phillips & Associates lawyers have represented plaintiffs in publicly reported matters involving Sean Combs, Harvey Weinstein, Kanye West, and Maksud Agadjani, the TraxNYC founder known from the film Uncut Gems. Those matters are pending or have been resolved in the courts where they were filed, the allegations in them are contested, and nothing on this page should be read as a finding by any court. 

What those matters have in common is not celebrity. It is that the opposing party had substantial resources, name recognition, sophisticated counsel, and significant reputational and litigation exposure. These matters still require pleading, discovery, motion practice, evidence development, damages analysis, and preparation for trial when necessary.

The underlying litigation issues are not unique to public figures. Similar power dynamics can arise when the accused person is a restaurant owner, managing partner, physician, founder, or executive with significant control over the employee's working conditions. The names and industries change. The questions about authority, employer knowledge, evidence, and retaliation often do not.

Coverage of the firm’s matters by national and international outlets is collected on In the Media.

Employment Cases Tried to Verdict

Trial tests whether the preparation done throughout the case holds up before a judge and jury.

Phillips & Associates has tried employment cases to jury verdict in the United States District Courts for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York and in New York State Supreme Court, and it has defended those verdicts through post-trial motions and on appeal. The firm has also tried cases that ended in verdicts for the defense. Phillips & Associates does not claim an undefeated trial record. Trial involves risk, and no lawyer can guarantee an outcome.

What the record does show is that the firm prepares litigated cases with trial in mind, and that several resulting decisions have outlived the matters that produced them.

Decisions in matters Phillips & Associates litigated have been cited by other courts and litigants more than 600 times. Vasquez alone accounts for more than 200 of those citations.

The published decisions can be reviewed directly. The Second Circuit opinions in Vasquez v. Empress Ambulance Service and Roberts v. Genting New York LLC are available through Justia.

The full record, including the trial verdicts, the appellate decisions, and the motion decisions grouped by claim type, is on Precedents and Decisions at /why-hire-us/precedents-and-decisions/.

How We Build Employment Cases

The Team

Every matter is handled by a dedicated litigation team that includes a lead attorney, an associate attorney, and a paralegal, led by a partner or senior litigator. Cases are not passed from person to person. The team that evaluates the case is the team that litigates it.

That continuity matters because employment cases change over time. A text message identified during intake becomes the exhibit at mediation.  A coworker mentioned during the first meeting may later become an important deposition witness.  A performance review nobody thought about becomes critical once the employer explains its side.

The firm works together in the office rather than remotely, which lets attorneys, paralegals, and partners develop evidence, prepare witnesses, and value cases in real time. The work is done in house under attorney supervision. Outside investigators are retained where locating former employees or verifying facts requires it.

The team model is described in full on Our Dedicated Litigation Team Model at /why-hire-us/team-structure/.

Digital Evidence and Preservation

Factual development starts as soon as a matter is accepted. The firm preserves digital communications and reviews texts, emails, Slack messages, Teams messages, WhatsApp messages, Signal messages, calendars, metadata, personnel files, HR records, performance reviews, write-ups, schedules, payroll records, and termination documents.

Modern harassment and retaliation cases often live on platforms the employer does not fully control and did not think to preserve. Identifying those platforms early and sending preservation demands before relevant data is deleted, overwritten, or lost can materially affect the evidence available later.

The record built at this stage includes a timeline of events, an inventory of documents and digital evidence, the witnesses with material knowledge, and an assessment of what evidence the employer controls and will have to produce.

Employer Structure and Decision-Makers

Employment cases rarely turn on a single incident. The firm examines the reporting structure, the supervisory relationships, the role human resources actually played, prior complaints, prior lawsuits, public filings, written policies, and whether other employees raised similar issues.

That analysis determines whether the matter is best understood as an individual claim, as a pattern of conduct, or, where the law and the facts support it, as a class or collective action. It also determines which decision-makers, HR personnel, supervisors, and corporate representatives need to be deposed.

Witness Development and Timeline Reconstruction

Witness development continues throughout the case. The firm identifies and develops current employees, former employees, supervisors, HR personnel, coworkers, and third parties who can confirm what happened or how the employer responded. Former employees can be particularly valuable witnesses in harassment and retaliation cases, and they can also be difficult to locate. The firm uses outside investigators when necessary to locate former employees or verify material facts.

In cases that unfold over months or years, timeline reconstruction is central. The firm rebuilds the sequence through digital communications, calendar entries, payroll and scheduling records, personnel data, witness recollection, contemporaneous third-party records, and, where appropriate, medical documentation.

Timeline reconstruction matters most in retaliation, whistleblower, accommodation, pregnancy, and parental leave cases, where the sequence between the protected activity and the adverse action is central to causation. In harassment and trait-based discrimination cases the evidence is different. Those cases are built on conduct: comments tied to a protected characteristic, the messages that recorded them, the witnesses who heard them, how HR handled the complaint, and whether the same conduct affected other people.

Discovery and depositions

Discovery in employment cases is uneven by design. The employer holds the documents, the internal communications, the HR records, the personnel files, the payroll data, the policies, the witnesses, and the decision-makers. The employee holds a phone and a memory.

Effective discovery requires knowing what to ask for, who had the information, who made the decision, who knew about the complaint, and whether the employer’s explanation matches the documents created at the time rather than the ones created afterward.

In retaliation cases, depositions focus on who knew about the protected activity, when they knew, what happened next, and whether the stated reason for the adverse action appears anywhere in the contemporaneous record. In hostile work environment and sexual harassment cases, they focus on the pattern of conduct, what management knew, prior complaints, witness accounts, and how the employer responded. In discrimination cases, discovery targets comparators, shifting explanations, discipline history, policy enforcement, and whether similarly situated employees were treated differently.

When defendants resist producing what the case requires, the firm moves to compel.

Expert Witnesses and Damages

The firm retains experts where the facts warrant it, including forensic psychologists and psychiatrists for emotional distress damages, economists and vocational rehabilitation experts for lost earnings and future earning capacity, actuaries for long-term damages, compensation consultants for pay equity and bonus disputes, and industry-specific experts where professional or regulatory standards are at issue.

The firm advances expert costs on a contingency basis. Expert reports are produced under the applicable federal or state rules, and experts are subject to deposition by opposing counsel.

Damages are evaluated early rather than at the end, including lost wages, lost benefits, lost bonuses and equity, future wage loss, emotional distress, career harm, mitigation, and the evidence needed to prove each of them. The goal is to prove the harm, not to claim it.

The Lawyers Behind Our Employment Litigation Record

Firm and Attorney Recognition

Phillips & Associates is ranked by Chambers and Partners in the 2026 Chambers USA Guide for Labor and Employment, Mainly Plaintiffs, and is listed in Best Law Firms 2026 and The Best Lawyers in America 2026. Firm attorneys appear as commentators in Law360, and the firm’s matters have been covered by the BBC, Forbes, Bloomberg Law, and Reuters.

All Ten Partners Named to the 2026 Lawdragon 500

All ten partners at Phillips & Associates are named to The 2026 Lawdragon 500 Leading Civil Rights and Plaintiff Employment Lawyers, the ninth edition of the guide.

Lawdragon selects the 500 through independent journalistic research, submissions, and peer and client vetting.  The full guide is published at Lawdragon.

William K. Phillips, Founder and Managing Partner

William K. Phillips founded the firm in 2011 and is admitted to practice before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Phillips founded the National Plaintiffs' Summit: Sexual Harassment & Employment Discrimination, where plaintiff-side employment lawyers exchange litigation strategy, developing law, case-valuation approaches, and trial practices.

Before practicing law, he served as a Vice President at Fieldstone Private Capital Group, a New York investment bank, where he handled international mergers, acquisitions, and restructurings. Employment-case valuation requires legal analysis, damages analysis, and judgment about risk. That investment-banking background informs the firm's approach to valuation, leverage, negotiation, and how sophisticated employers assess financial exposure.

How the firm values cases, including the multi-attorney review process and the proprietary case database behind it, is explained on How Phillips & Associates Values Employment Cases.

Attorney credentials and case assignments are detailed on Our Team, and the firm’s honors and rankings are listed on Awards and Recognition.

Before You Decide Whether to Report or Pursue a Claim

Speaking with an attorney does not commit you to filing a lawsuit. Employees often contact the firm before reporting misconduct, leaving a job, responding to an internal investigation, or deciding whether to pursue a claim. Consultations are free and confidential.

Learn more about the firm's approach to these conversations on our Trauma-Informed Representation page.

Speak With an Employment Law Firm Built to Litigate

If you are deciding whether to bring an employment claim, the litigation record behind the firm you choose can affect how an employer and its defense counsel assess the risk of continuing the case.

Phillips & Associates evaluates matters carefully and prepares accepted cases with litigation in mind when necessary. Consultations are free and confidential, and the firm works on contingency, so there are no attorney fees unless it recovers compensation for you. Speaking with an attorney does not commit you to filing a lawsuit.

Free consultation. No attorney fees unless we recover.

Call 866-229-9441 or submit your information through the firm’s contact form.

Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Court cases and decisions described on this page reflect matters in which Phillips & Associates served as counsel. Aggregate figures are drawn from the firm's internal case records and may include matters resolved before filing.

Updated: August 2026