Robert K. Carrol 

Robert K. Carrol is a management-side employment law partner at ArentFox Schiff LLP, where he specializes in representing clients in the food and beverage, agribusiness and tech industries. He joined the firm in 2015.

He joined ArentFox in 2016. Among his clients are Breville Group; Califia Farms; Enel Group; the Louis Roederer Family, including Roederer Estate; Lagunitas Brewing Co.; Sun Pacific Farming Cooperative; RFI Communications; Jacmar Foodservice Distribution; The Sun Valley Group and MJ Gilbert Construction Co. Inc.

Carrol's long career dates from a time "when there was no employment law," he said, recalling that in 1977 he was the seventeenth hire at Littler Mendelson P.C. "Back then, it was employers slugging it out with unions. In California, the concept of wrongful termination hadn't even been invented yet."

He noted that when Gov. Jerry Brown first took office in 1975, he signed the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act after receiving significant political support from labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers. That led to an onslaught of litigation -- and Carrol was well-positioned to represent employers.

"I was the only management side lawyer in the state who could speak Spanish," he said, crediting a year he'd lived in Spain for his fluency in the language. "I could get in there and litigate on their terms. I regarded it as almost malpractice if you couldn't examine witnesses in their native language."

Carrol's relationship with longtime clients like the Sun Pacific Farming Cooperative, one of the state's largest citrus and tree fruit producers, dates from those days and continues now.

"In 1978, I represented Sun Pacific in a UFW organizing drive. In 2002, I remember being in a mediation for this client when the plaintiffs came along with their first class action -- they asked for $106 million over wage and hour claims by hundreds of workers and management hit the roof over how unreasonable that seemed. Then, as now, we defeated class certification."

Carrol's technique is to go out into the fields where farmworkers toil to take on-site depositions regarding their working conditions. "If we find facts that are not consistent with those claimed by the named plaintiffs, we can get certification denied," he said.

In two current class actions, he's following that pattern. Both allege wage and hour violations. Velasco et al. v. Sun Pacific Farming Cooperative, Inc., BCV-21-101897 (Kern Co. Super. Ct., filed Aug. 18, 2021); Castanon et al. v. Sun Pacific Shippers L.P., BCV-21-101708 (Kern Co. Super. Ct., filed July 27, 2021).

"We recently beat a similar case where the settlement demand was $176 million," he said. "We got a complete dismissal. Fingers crossed, we do it again here."

-- John Roemer