Lindsay E. Hutner

San Francisco

After a first year that took her into pharmaceutical and science-heavy work, Lindsay Hutner spent the following 20 years pursuing employment litigation.

What drew her to the field was people. "To do this work well, you have to understand how people think -- their personalities, motivations and psychology -- and why they make the choices they do, especially when those choices are hard to understand," Hutner said. She was also pulled toward trial work. "I always envisioned myself inside a courtroom, in front of a judge and jury, advocating with passion -- fortunately I found my passion in employment litigation."

Hutner's recent matters span arbitration, class actions and trial. She co-led Greenberg Traurig to an arbitration win on all claims brought by a building products manufacturer's former CEO, who sought an eight-figure damages award for alleged discrimination. The claimant had been removed from the company's board, suspended and terminated after orchestrating a scheme to reclassify taxable bonuses as tax-free disaster-relief payments under IRC §139, using the COVID-19 pandemic as cover.

"I dismantled these claims by presenting compelling evidence that claimant had in fact been promoted, given raises and appointed CEO -- directly undercutting any credible claim of bias," Hutner said. Her team compelled arbitration over the claimant's objection, then carried the matter through a year of litigation in Riverside County Superior Court to a two-week arbitration hearing in March 2025. The arbitrator's Aug. 6, 2025 ruling found no discrimination, deemed the claimant "not a credible witness in any respect," and admonished opposing counsel.

Hutner represents a clothing retailer in its nationwide employment litigation. In a wage-and-hour class action over overtime that omitted commissions and bonuses, where an initial proposed settlement would have totaled $1.1 million across nearly 3,000 employees, she settled for a fraction under confidential terms. The case drew notice when plaintiffs' counsel filed a brief containing hallucinated quotes and a nonexistent case citation generated by AI. For the same retailer, she defended a discrimination, harassment and retaliation suit arising from the termination of an employee. She also won a full defense verdict at an evidentiary hearing one week after joining a five-year-old case for a real estate development company and secured dismissal of all but two claims on demurrer for a technology company in a joint employment action.

On trends, Hutner points to wage-and-hour exposure in California. "Wage-and-hour issues (such as overtime, minimum wage, meal/rest breaks, off-the-clock work) remain a top litigation and enforcement risk for employers here," she said. She sees class and collective actions and PAGA claims continuing to drive litigation risk despite the July 2024 PAGA reforms.