Caroline Powell Donelan

Donelan emphasizes her talent for becoming an "inside-outside" counsel to her employer-side labor and employment clients. She seeks to know her clients' businesses so well they regard her as a trusted advisor to their operations, especially in the Age of Covid, she said.

Meanwhile, she's still working from home, she said in late July. "We had 1,100 people at this firm across the country transfer to remote work in just a couple of days. That was impressive. Now, here in L.A. we have an app that lets you reserve an office conference room if needed for a deposition or a meeting. I haven't used it yet, but I have a five-year-old and a seven-year-old at home, and I have some depos coming up, so I might look to the office for a quiet place to go."

Donelan said access to her firm's offices in one of the towers in Century City is slowed by the high-rise elevator limits of two persons per trip. "I hear that if you can get over the hump of a 10- to 20-minute wait, it's nice and quiet up in the office," she said.

Among her major clients, Donelan supervises and manages workplace investigations and employment litigation for The Estée Lauder Co. and its subsidiaries, including California class and representative actions and individual sexual harassment claims. One such potential class action involved litigating issues under the state Supreme Court's Dynamex decision and its progeny regarding proper classification of independent contractors--a dominant, nuanced issue in California class action law. Provencio v. Too Faced Cosmetics LLC, 18-cv-336593 (Santa Clara Co. Super. Ct., filed Oct. 23, 2018).

"Many makeup brands engaged makeup artists as freelancers who go from store to store selling makeup," Donelan said. "It was a common business model in the beauty industry. Here the plaintiff said she should have been a regular W-2 employee with meal and rest periods and expense reimbursements. We pulled an obscure exemption in employment law called the outside salesperson exemption because she was a traveling salesperson. We got a great deal for the client; the settlement was approved just a few weeks ago."

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Thomas E. Kuhnie approved the $500,000 deal, according to court documents. "Our leverage in settlement mediation was the exemption," Donelan said.

She added that she has achieved "inside-outside" attorney status with Estée Lauder's house counsel and has advised the company on Covid-related issues. "There's no black-and-white with this issue," she said. "Everything has to be assessed on a risk-benefit basis. I'm proud to be a trusted advisor in the face of this kind of uncertainty."

-- John Roemer