Cheryl D. Orr

Orr has spent most of her career defending wage and hour class action cases. At any given time, her team of attorneys has as many as 20 of these cases on their plate.

“We’ve been defending them for so long, we’re familiar with the issues, the plaintiff bar, the judges and the underlying issues,” Orr said. “Accordingly we can conduct an internal investigation to see if there’s merit to the claims and how to best posture it for resolution.”

While the attorney, elected managing partner of the firm and chair of its national labor and employment practice group, is often able to dismiss the multimillion-dollar class actions early on through dispositive motions, she has also been largely successful litigating them in court.

In a case against Kaplan International in which the plaintiff alleged that the education company had systematically underpaid instructors, Orr realized early on that the defense was represented by Shannon Liss-Riordan, who recently obtained eight- and nine-figure settlements in similar wage and hour cases against Lyft Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. In turn, the veteran attorney was able to persuade the opposing counsel that their suit would not proceed past class certification, in which they would lose most of their leverage. Ridley v. Kaplan International North America, LLC, 16-cv-02536 (N.D. Cal., filed May 11, 2016).

Orr was able to negotiate an individual settlement and dismiss the suit, all before engaging in any discovery. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, Orr has become an industry leader in auditing the anti-harassment policies and practices of some of the country’s biggest retailers in addition to Bay Area startups. She said she is very proud that half of the firm’s managing partners are women. Companies are trying to get ahead of the problem because the last thing they want to see is their names in the paper, according to Orr. She is responsible for ensuring open lines of communication and properly responding to concerns in a prompt manner, preventative training for employees and how to identify potentially troubling behavior.

“What all have in common is an interest in making sure that going forward, they’re creating a comfortable and respectable workplace,” she said.

— Winston Cho