The 2027 Lawdragon 500 Leading Corporate Employment Lawyers

From litigating wage & hour claims to negotiating restrictive covenant clauses, these Labor & Employment lawyers advise companies large and small on their most pressing workplace needs. Deal lawyers handling executive compensation and employee benefits remain a cornerstone of this guide, along with the many litigators hammering out issues from collective bargaining to harassment – or, even better, keeping them out of the courtroom altogether. 

Longtime labor & employment counsel to Amazon in Kentucky, LaToi Mayo of Littler Mendelson has a busy docket with a handful of new employee cases against the commerce behemoth in the past year. She is known for her shrewd work enforcing employment arbitration agreements and defending companies against discrimination and wage and hour claims. She is the co-chair of the firm's Healthcare Industry Group, and serves on the Kentucky Bar Association's Board of Governors where she was appointed to its Trial Commission for 2024 to 2028.

Julie Totten is at the forefront of litigation over AI's impact on hiring. Head of Orrick's Global Employment Law and Litigation Practice Group, she and partner Erin Connell are leading a case for Workday over allegations that the HR software platform uses AI in a way that discriminates against job applicants based on race, sex, age and disability. The Orrick team narrowed the claims of the case early on, securing dismissal of the intentional discrimination claims, and won a notable 2026 ruling shielding Workday's attorney-directed bias-testing data from discovery. The ongoing case, Mobley v. Workday, is being closely watched in the Labor & Employment space to determine whether AI hiring tools can create discrimination liability through disparate impact. 

Co-chair of Paul, Weiss's Executive Compensation Group, Larry Witdorchic led the executive compensation aspects last month for a group of New Fortress Energy bondholders in a restructuring and recapitalization deal that eliminated $5.7B in third-party debt – one of the largest consensual UK restructuring plan transactions on record. He has an expansive practice structuring the executive and equity compensation and employee benefits features of mergers, exits, IPOs and other transactions, working with large public companies and private funds. His counsel extends to tax, accounting and securities law as they intersect with compensation and employment agreements. 

We selected the honorees for this guide with our proprietary process, combining independent research, submissions and vetting. Those individuals marked with an asterisk are permanent members of our Hall of Fame.