Felix Shafir 

Felix Shafir specializes in labor and employment law appeals at Horvitz & Levy LLP. He joined the firm in 2006 following clerkships for judges on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and at the Southern District of New York after graduating cum laude from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.

He also worked briefly for the employment law firm Littler Mendelson and in the employment department at Mayer Brown.

“I got into the employment law field straight out of law school when I went to work for Littler,” Shafir said. “I got interested in the court side of it, and I did the clerkships because I wanted to understand how the judicial process worked, the nuts and bolts of the process.” It was during the early 2000s. “This was when class actions started flaring up in the employment space. I was getting interested in the appellate side of it, and I touched base at Mayer Brown before joining Horvitz.”

The chief issue these days is the tension between companies’ arbitration rights and workers’ access to representative actions through California’s Private Attorneys General Act. “PAGA is the main battlefield right now,” Shafir said, speaking a few days after the state Supreme Court had pushed back against the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 holding. Viking River Cruises, Inc. v. Moriana, 142 S.Ct. 1906 (U.S. S.Ct., op. filed June 15, 2022).

Shafir wrote an influential amicus brief on behalf of two pro-employer groups, the Washington Legal Foundation and the Atlantic Legal Foundation, urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hold that the Federal Arbitration Act preempts the California rule prohibiting the enforcement of an arbitration agreement’s PAGA representative action waiver. The high court agreed, holding that the FAA applies to PAGA claims, though it left a state law loophole that the state Supreme Court used to affirm workers’ PAGA rights. Adolph v. Uber Technologies, Inc., S274671 (Ca. S.Ct., op. filed July 17, 2023).

“The state Supreme Court didn’t give a lot of explanation for the standing of PAGA plaintiffs,” Shafir said. “The opinion is a pure state law interpretation that didn’t answer several related federal questions. With the ever-growing flood of PAGA litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court may well step in again.”

Shafir has prepared a cert petition in a related matter that is on grant-and-hold status after his client, Lyft, Inc., failed to persuade state trial and appellate courts to compel arbitration in a PAGA claim. “We have raised the applicable federal questions,” he said, “and now the court has discretion to take it up on the merits.” Lyft, Inc. v. Seifu, 21-742 (U.S. S.Ct., filed Nov. 16, 2021).

“I don’t know whether it makes me a masochist or not, but I enjoy these fights,” Shafir said.

—John Roemer