Mike Delikat,

a partner in the New York office, serves as Chair of Orrick’s Global Employment Law Practice, which has employment law teams in the European Union, Asia as well as the United States. He also is the founder of the firm’s Whistleblower Task Force. He previously served as the Managing Director of Orrick’s Litigation Division.

Under Mr. Delikat’s leadership, Orrick’s Employment Law & Litigation group was recently named Labor & Employment Department of the Year in California by The Recorder, the premier source for legal news, in recognition of their significant wins on behalf of leading multinational companies on today’s most complex and challenging employment law matters. The practice group has also been chosen as one of the top national employment law practices by Law 360.

He represents a broad range of major corporations in all facets of labor and employment law. Mr. Delikat has an active trial, arbitration and appellate practice and handles a number of high-visibility class action and impact cases. Mr. Delikat has extensive experience with litigation arising from trade secret misappropriation and the enforcement of post-employment restrictions, EEOC systemic investigations and litigations, wage-and-hour collective actions and other class actions based on gender and race, with particular expertise representing companies in the financial services industry.

He currently has an active practice representing a number of major corporations in the defense of Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other whistleblower claims and is the coauthor of the only extensive treatise published on whistleblowing and internal investigations, Corporate Whistleblowing in the Sarbanes-Oxley/Dodd-Frank Era. He is regularly retained by boards of directors and audit committees to conduct high exposure internal investigations of corporate wrongdoing.

Representative clients:

Microsoft. Mr. Delikat regularly advises this client on matters involving the enforcement of post-employment restrictions and restrictive covenants.
Gannett/USA Today. Mr. Delikat has represented this client on a variety of post-employment restriction and trade secret litigation.
Oracle. Mr. Delikat represented Oracle in multiple litigations, including a preliminary injunction trial involving efforts by a competitor to enforce its noncompete agreements.
AllianceBernstein. Mr. Delikat has represented this client on multiple matters in court and in arbitration, including a successful defense of an ERISA class action.
Facebook. Mr. Delikat created a single contact point solution for all of this client’s employment law needs outside the United States, which now is managed through Orrick’s unique Global HR Solutions platform.
PG&E Corporation. Mr. Delikat obtained a complete defense verdict in a jury trial brought in the Maryland state court seeking to hold PG&E liable for multimillion dollar bonuses claimed by energy traders.
Carrols Corporation. Mr. Delikat successfully represented Carrols Corporation, the largest holder of Burger King franchises, in the largest pattern and practice systemic class action for sexual harassment ever brought by the EEOC in EEOC v. Carrols.
Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. This client regularly looks to Mr. Delikat for representation in filing amicus briefs on issues of paramount importance to SIFMA and its members.
Citigroup. Mr. Delikat regularly represents this client on a variety of employment disputes.
AIG Corporation. The Board of Directors of this company retained Mr. Delikat to conduct a high-profile internal investigation of one of its senior executives.
Wyeth. Mr. Delikat successfully defended Wyeth in a two-week jury trial in federal court alleging race discrimination. He also represented this client on several Sarbanes-Oxley whistleblower matters, including the successful defense of Livingston v. Wyeth, which was the first U.S. Court of Appeals decision on what constitutes protected activity under the whistleblower provisions of SOX.
Roche. Mr. Delikat successfully represented Roche in several wage-and-hour collective actions which challenged the classification of pharmaceutical representatives as exempt from the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Moody’s Investors Service. Mr. Delikat defended Moody’s in a 400-plaintiff Title VII class action in the Southern District of New York alleging race and national origin discrimination in promotion.
Major Law Firm Representation. Mr. Delikat represents a number of major law firms on a variety of matters relating to their partners, associates and staff. He obtained a seminal decision in Weir v. Holland & Knight, which held that law firm partners are not covered by statutory discrimination protections.
Time Warner, Inc. Mr. Delikat obtained summary judgment on behalf of this client in a discrimination case brought by an in-house lawyer, affirmed on appeal by the Second Circuit, establishing the standard for retaliation claims in that Circuit.

Mr. Delikat is published and quoted frequently on a variety of employment law issues in major academic and business publications and is a frequent speaker at national and international programs.