FACULTY BIOGRAPHIES Ida Abbott is a retirement strategist who helps clients design creative, purposeful, and dignified retirements. She is an internationally recognized expert on talent and career development, especially mentoring, advancing women, and retirement. Ida has counseled lawyers and firms since 1995 and was a trial lawyer for 20 years before that. In recognition of her lifetime contributions to the legal profession, she was elected a Fellow of both the American Bar Foundation and the College of Law Practice Management. She is an advisor, coach, speaker, and author of several seminal books, including Retirement by Design, named one of the six best retirement books of 2020 by The Wall Street Journal. More information about Ida and her practice can be found on her website, www. IdaAbbott.com. Contact: ida@idaabbott.com; (510) 339-6883 Bernard Alexander prosecutes demanding private and public sector employment cases. He has tried over sixty cases to verdict with seven- and eight-figure judgments for claims of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation based on gender, race, age, sex, sexual orientation, and disability, among other things. His verdicts include: (1) $3 million for a security guard terminated for “job abandonment” after he took emergency leave from work to care for his school age daughter (February 2018); (2) $5.3 million for a 25-year FedEx employee fired after not having his disability accommodated (March 2019); (3) $1.3 million for CFRA retaliation, for a 29-year employee terminated before his return from leave (April 2019); and $100,000 in a Title IX retaliation case where a girls’ soccer coach complained of unequal treatment compared to boys sports (Sept 2019). Board Member of the National Employment Lawyers Association; Past Chair of the California Employment Law Association; 2016 CELA Joe Posner Award Recipient; 2019 Top 100 Attorneys in California; Top 75 California Labor and Employment Lawyer (2012 to present); Top 100 Southern California Super Lawyers (2015 to present); American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA): Associate 2013. Contact: balexander@amfllp.com; (310) 394-0888 Clif Alexander is a South Texas native and co-founder of Anderson Alexander, PLLC, which is based in Corpus Christi, Texas. Mr. Alexander’s practice focuses on pursuing wage and hour violations on behalf of employees across the United States in individual and large-scale collective/class actions under the Fair Labor Standards 50
2022 NELA ANNUAL CONVENTION
Act and related state wage and hour laws. Contact: clif@a2xlaw.com; (361) 947-2543 Rebekah L. Bailey is a partner at Nichols Kaster, PLLP, in Minneapolis where she represents employees, students, and consumers in class actions and relators in qui tam litigation. She is a founding member of the firm’s civil rights and impact team and consumer class action group, and she has served on the firm’s national wage and hour team. Rebekah chairs her firm’s eDiscovery committee, developing and implementing internal eDiscovery policies, procedures, and tools. Rebekah is a member of the steering committee for the Sedona Conference’s Working Group 1, the board for the Complex eDiscovery Litigation Forum (CLEF), the global advisory counsel for EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model), and the advisory board for the Advanced eDiscovery Institute at Georgetown. Rebekah has spoken at national conferences on various topics such as eDiscovery, arbitration, class actions, equal pay, and various wage and hour issues. Contact: bailey@nka.com; (612) 256-3287 A staunch advocate for employee rights on both the state and national level, Patricia A. Barasch has helped to build Schall & Barasch into one of the preeminent plaintiffs’ employment-rights law firms in the state. Throughout her nearly 30-year career, she has represented employees in cases involving all types of unfair and illegal employment practices including claims involving race, sex, age, and disability discrimination, sexual harassment, reasonable accommodation, the Family Medical Leave Act, wrongful termination, breach of contract, retaliation, and noncompete agreements. From June 2010 to June 2013, Ms. Barasch was honored to serve as President of the National Employment Lawyers Association, the largest organization of plaintiffs’ employment lawyers in the United States. Contact: pbarasch@schallandbarasch.com; (856) 914-9200 Dr. Robert A. Bardwell has over 30 years of experience consulting and providing expert witness testimony in statistics, probability modeling, demographics, econometrics, and computer algorithms. Dr. Bardwell has been retained by government agencies, corporations, and plaintiffs and defendants, and has testified as an expert in numerous United States District Courts and state and county courts. Dr. Bardwell has provided expert
