Rebecca Aragon is the chair of Venable's Labor and Employment Practice Group in Los Angeles. She is a 21-year veteran of labor and employment litigation who represents corporate employers in employment matters in federal and state courts.

Ms. Aragon focuses a large portion of her practice on the defense of class, collective, multi-plaintiff and hybrid wage and hour actions. She has a proven track record of helping national and California-based clients navigate the intricacies of federal labor law and California's complex Labor Code to achieve favorable outcomes in wage and hour actions involving employee claims of misclassification, missed meal and rest periods, "off-the-clock" work, unreimbursed expenses, inaccurate paychecks, illegal tip-pooling, improper overtime calculations and unfair competition.

Ms. Aragon has had lead responsibility in successfully defending numerous wage and hour class or collective actions. For example, she was instrumental in defeating a putative class action, by prevailing on a motion to dismiss and on appeal, in a widely publicized class action involving unpaid wage claims.  In another case, she resolved a 400-employee wage and hour class action for less than 15 dollars per class member. She was part of a team that obtained summary judgment and defeated a class action involving hundreds of employees who claimed they were denied equal protection in benefit accruals.

In two of her recent class actions, she persuaded opposing counsel in each of the cases to submit the entire litigation to binding arbitration despite unenforceability hurdles posed by the terms in the arbitration agreements. In the last few months, she has continued to successfully resolve difficult class actions. In one case, after waging a successful declaration campaign, she persuaded opposing counsel to abandon all class action claims in a California suit where the plaintiff alleged that thousands of employees were misclassified as exempt professionals. In another recent case, Ms. Aragon resolved a wage and hour class action for a fraction of plaintiffs' demand after she minimized the size of the putative class and eliminated several subclasses.

Her labor and employment litigation experience also includes defending clients against employee claims of wrongful termination, sexual harassment, retaliation, whistle-blowing, breach of contract, invasion of privacy, misrepresentation, defamation, emotional distress, and discrimination involving race, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, handicap and medical condition issues. Ms. Aragon also has successful jury and bench trial experience, including a defense victory in a four-week jury trial for a medical center accused of wrongfully terminating six employees.

In addition to serving as litigation counsel, Ms. Aragon advises her clients on wage and exempt classification compliance, employee hiring procedures, employee retention, reductions in force, employee discipline, arbitration policies, union avoidance, employee severance and termination strategies, workplace privacy, independent contractor agreements, internal investigations of alleged harassment and other employee wrongdoing, protection of proprietary information and drug testing matters. She also counsels her clients on federal and state law compliance with the Americans with Disabilities and the Family and Medical Leave Acts.

Ms. Aragon also has significant experience working with businesses employing large Spanish-speaking workforces and has provided bilingual employee training on union avoidance, sexual harassment prevention and discrimination issues. She also has developed Spanish-language employment policies.

Ms. Aragon has used alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, such as neutral evaluations, direct negotiations, mediations and court-ordered settlement conferences, to secure favorable decisions for her clients.

Activities