Margaret Santen

Shareholder || Charlotte, Atlanta

Maggie Santen is the co-chair of the firm’s Class and Collective Action Practice Group. She focuses her practice on developing winning strategies for the defense of large-scale class and collective actions across the country. While this typically includes the defense of independent contractor misclassification claims, Maggie also has extensive experience defending class and collective actions involving wage and hour issues of all kinds, systemic gender discrimination claims, and various commercial claims in federal district courts throughout the country, from California to Maine. Maggie’s experience in the class action area has been repeatedly recognized by her peers in the legal community, resulting in her selection to the Georgia Super Lawyers, Rising Stars list every year since 2012.

In addition to her litigation experience, Maggie also focuses on partnering with her clients to assist with day-to-day counseling issues, covering the gamut of employment issues and implementing legally-defensible workplace policies, focusing on risk management and compliance. This often includes drafting independent contractor agreements, job descriptions and pay policies; conducting comprehensive wage/hour and wage/payment audits and implementing effective strategies for compliance; and conducting management training. This also includes implementing successful alternative dispute resolution procedures such as arbitration agreements, developing effective roll-out strategies, successfully compelling claims to arbitration and litigating any challenges to the same, and handling the arbitration proceedings themselves.

Finally, Maggie routinely represents her clients in Department of Labor wage and hour audits and state unemployment tax audits, vigorously defending any resulting litigation. This also includes handling administrative hearings for class-based unemployment tax appeals against the state Department of Labor or equivalent agency, where she has been successful in multiple jurisdictions in obtaining complete reversal of class-based employee determinations and dismissal of large-scale tax assessments.

Learn more about Margaret Santen

Education

Admittance to Practice

Professional Activities

  • Advisory Board of Thomson Reuters Practical Law’s Labor & Employment Service
  • Atlanta Volunteer Lawyer’s Foundation Board Member
  • National Association of Women Lawyers
  • Atlanta Bar Association
  • North Fulton Bar Association
  • Trinity Community Ministries (Board Member)
  • Trinity Community Ministries (Human Resources Committee Chair)
  • Volunteer for Pro Bono Partnership of Atlanta
  • North Fulton-GEM SHRM Atlanta

Speeches

Insights by Margaret Santen