Camille Hamilton Pating 

Camille Hamilton Pating chairs her firm’s statewide labor and employment group and its workplace investigations practice. She does relatively little litigation, however. She concentrates largely on investigations, which she and the firm have been doing for 15 years.

“I guess we were ahead of the curve in that way,” Pating said.

Her focus on the specialty grew out of her work as part of the teams that investigated a high-profile officer-involved shooting at a BART station in 2009 and widespread corruption in the city of Bell in 2010.

Since then, she has conducted about 300 investigations for businesses, local governments, schools and even police departments. Issues have ranged from ethics violations and misappropriation to harassment, discrimination and workplace violence.

Pating said her work has measurably increased since the pandemic. She and her team have conducted more than 50 in the last two years alone. The most common issues have been harassment, bullying, discrimination and retaliation.

“I think the reason is because we just have so many more kinds of these complaints which are to some extent more subtle than we used to receive before the pandemic,” Pating said. “Now, we also get more complaints that are founded on micro behaviors … that might be unintentional, but that have an impact of being harmful or demeaning for the recipient.”

And with some employees still working remotely, she is beginning to see what she calls proximity discrimination, in which people working from home complain that those now back in the office are receiving better assignments.

Many of her team’s cases are very serious. “In the last year, we’ve done an investigation for a school district involving a student death … [into] the circumstances and the employees who were supervising.”

As an offshoot of her investigations, she now also advises clients and provides training on policies and procedures to avoid discrimination and harassment. Pating said she is seeing much more interest from clients in training about “proactive equity issues” like bias prevention.

She has conducted at least 30 such trainings so far this year. Employees these days especially ask about how to interact with people and what behavior is acceptable. “A lot of the training we do now is about these expanded ranges of bias prevention and how we go about fostering a more respectful work culture for everyone … [where] everyone feels included.”

Pating said she worked on helping employers develop healthy and inclusive workplaces “even when I wasn’t compensated for it years ago before workplace cultures and environments were recognized as an integral part of labor and employment practice.”

Now, it is her specialty. “It’s just so much more rewarding to be able to focus on the proactive part of our practice,” she said. “I love this preventive practice.”

— Don DeBenedictis