Parisis G. (“Gerry”) Filippatos is the Founding Partner of Filippatos PLLC. Mr. Filippatos is a seasoned and versatile labor and employment attorney with over three decades of experience in the field.
He has represented thousands of employees in legal matters involving employment discrimination, harassment, or retaliation based on gender, pregnancy, race, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity; separation and severance agreements; executive compensation; restrictive covenants; and whistleblower retaliation.
Mr. Filippatos concentrates his practice in the litigation of gender discrimination, sexual harassment and assault, as well as retaliation cases against financial services firms and Fortune 500 companies.
He is also an expert negotiator, having successfully resolved countless cases on behalf of individuals in matters involving executive compensation, employment contracts, and severance agreements.
Mr. Filippatos’s clients hail from a broad range of industries, including financial services, accounting, entertainment, information technology, healthcare, education, restaurant and hospitality, transportation, and retail.
Before dedicating his career to plaintiff-side employment law, Mr. Filippatos provided strategic advise to myriad corporations on employment issues including, but not limited to, drafting employee handbooks, enforcement of workplace policies and procedures, investigations of employment discrimination or sexual harassment and assault, human resources management, organizational structure, employee benefits, labor relations, and regulatory compliance.
Mr. Filippatos now draws upon his extensive experience advising management in workplace disputes to effectively counsel individuals who have been subjected to discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and other forms of workplace misconduct.
A dedicated and industrious advocate for justice in the workplace, Mr. Filippatos is a longtime member of the American Bar Association’s Labor & Employment Law and Litigation Sections and the National Employment Lawyers Association (“NELA”) and NELA’s New York Chapter.
Publicity
Mr. Filippatos has handled several high‐profile matters that have garnered significant, and often national, media attention. He and his cases have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters, CNBC, Forbes, Business Insider, Institutional Investor, HuffPost, The Guardian, New York Magazine, New York Post, Gothamist, Law360, Society for Human Resource Management, Employee Benefit News, Reuters, CNN, and many other established media outlets. Due to his work handling prominent employment discrimination and sexual harassment cases, Mr. Filippatos has appeared on the cover of U.S. Business News.
During the firm’s work on Abby Grossberg’s case, Mr. Filippatos appeared in many media interviews, including MSNBC’s Deadline Whitehouse, Anderson Cooper 360, and CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront.
Mr. Filippatos is also an author and lecturer on various employment-related subjects such as reductions in force, case assessment, whistleblower protection, age discrimination, family and medical leave, violence in the workplace, litigation tactics and strategies, and EEOC administrative procedures and ethics.
He has presented at various national legal conferences, including the NELA Annual Convention, and has conducted legal seminars for the American Conference Institute and the Practicing Law Institute. Mr. Filippatos has also published articles about workplace sexual harassment and assault in the #MeToo era and other employment-related issues in The Employee Advocate, Recruiter.com and various other legal journals and websites.
Background & Experience
Mr. Filippatos was born and raised in New York City, migrating along the Hudson from Hell’s Kitchen, to the Upper Westside, to Riverdale, before settling in White Plains, New York and Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Upon graduating from law school in 1991, Mr. Filippatos served as Assistant Corporation Counsel in the New York City Law Department, where he litigated Section 1983 and Title VII cases.
After spending nearly a decade practicing management-side employment law at two boutique law firms, Mr. Filippatos became a founding member of one of the largest plaintiff-side employment law firms in the country before starting his own plaintiff-side practice in 2004.
Just prior to resuming his career as a plaintiff-side employment lawyer four years ago, Mr. Filippatos was in-house counsel for five years for a jointly trusteed labor-management organization where he advised on strategic issues, such as regulatory compliance and organizational structure, while also teaching governmental and labor studies to union apprentices as an Adjunct Professor at Empire State College.
From 2017 through 2019, Mr. Filippatos was a partner at one of the largest plaintiff-side employment law firms in New York City; in 2020, Mr. Filippatos migrated as a partner to a preeminent competitor firm before deciding to re-establish Filippatos PLLC in 2021.
