On the 10th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Wal-Mart v. Dukes,  Law360 (subscription) has published a feature including commentary from some of the nation’s top employment attorneys on how the Dukes decision has shifted litigation strategies for wage and hour cases.

Many saw the June 2011 decision as a major blow to workers’ rights, as the Court ruled that a group of nearly 1.5 million women could not be certified as a valid class of plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit for employment discrimination against Walmart.

Lieff Cabraser partner Daniel Hutchinson, who heads the firm’s worker-side employment practice group, notes that, “the Dukes case may have encouraged plaintiffs attorneys to avoid taking on class and collective employment cases that could pose challenges in terms of securing certification.”

“We’re particularly careful in the cases that we decide to bring forward,” Hutchinson added. “I just don’t think it makes sense to plead anything other than what you really think is an issue at the start of the case.”

Read the full piece on the Law360 website.

About Daniel Hutchinson

The Chair of Lieff Cabraser’s employment practice groupDaniel M. Hutchinson specializes in complex class and collective actions that advance the public interest. As a partner at Lieff Cabraser, Daniel served as lead or co-lead counsel on cases that recovered over $800 million for his clients in a variety of industries and across myriad discrimination, unpaid wages, ERISA, consumer protection, and financial fraud matters.

He is an advocate for underrepresented and disadvantaged communities, and has litigated cases involving unfair employment practices against immigrants. Daniel has pursued a series of consumer protection cases against major banks and financial services providers. His efforts have helped result in the largest monetary settlement in the history of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and ended harassing automated calls to millions of consumers. Prior to joining Lieff Cabraser in 2005, Daniel graduated from Berkeley Law and Brown University.

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