Chris Pace has extensive experience in the areas of employment litigation, counseling, and investigation, with a primary focus on class and collective actions, systemic discrimination claims, and wage and hour matters.
Prior to joining Ogletree Deakins, Chris served as lead in house employment litigation counsel to a Fortune 50 company where he led a group of professionals tasked with defending domestic and international employment litigation and administrative claims. While in house, Chris directed the defense of scores of class and collective actions, defended hundreds of employment lawsuits and administrative claims, first-chaired scores of arbitrations of labor and employment disputes, prosecuted and defended covenant not to compete matters and advised senior executives and HR personnel on reductions in force, HR policy and other employment issues.
For the last decade, Chris has concentrated his practice on the defense of class and collective actions. He has extensive experience with the defense of FLSA off-the-clock and misclassification cases, age discrimination collective action matters, and Title VII class discrimination and pattern or practice claims. Examples of Chris’ recent successes include:
- Denial of national conditional certification of age discrimination claims under the ADEA;
- Denial of conditional certification of putative national class in collective action arbitration;
- Denial of class action certification of off-the-clock claims under various states’ laws;
- Denial of state-wide FLSA conditional collective action certification of an off-the-clock claim;
- Decertification of an off-the-clock FLSA action involving 800 employees across the United States and two state law class actions involving more than 3,200 employees;
- Decertification of an off-the-clock FLSA collective action involving more than 475 employees working at a single location;
- Summary judgment in an outside sales FLSA misclassification case;
- Summary judgment and win on appeal on Motor Carrier Act exemption case;
- Summary judgment on a novel issue under Section 203(o) of the FLSA;
- Pre-conditional certification dismissal of collective action claims in off-the-clock case.
