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Amy Morrissey Turk Partner

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Amy Morrissey Turk is co-chair of McGuireWoods’ consumer products and retail industry team as well as the firm’s multidisciplinary diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practice team. She works on complex class actions and mass arbitrations throughout the country for companies in a variety of industries, most notably the retail, health care, and financial services industries. Amy offers clients a broad spectrum of legal experience gained both as a seasoned litigator for business-focused law firms and also as a former assistant general counsel who managed the nationwide employment portfolio of a multibillion-dollar Fortune 150 retail corporation. In that in-house role, she led and directed internal investigations and the company’s litigation strategy in employment matters pending before arbitrators, agencies at all governmental levels, and state and federal courts throughout the United States. She has extensive experience managing nationwide class, collective, and mass claims.

Amy is both a trusted advisor to some of the largest companies in the country and a first-chair litigator who regularly leads high stakes litigation, navigates complicated mass arbitration matters, conducts sensitive investigations, and advises officers and C-Suite executives on compliance and regulatory risk. While her mass arbitration experience spans the commercial, consumer, and employment spectrum, Amy’s litigation practice focuses on employment-related defense, including workplace violence and crisis management, federal and state wage and hour laws (including Private Attorneys General Act representative actions in California), public accommodation matters, hostile work environment and discrimination issues that span all protected classes, and all facets of DEI. While Amy’s practice focuses on litigation-based matters, she understands first-hand the legal, financial, political and publicity challenges clients face when managing litigation risk and that understanding helps inform the legal guidance she provides.

Amy has a long track record of defeating class and collective certification, obtaining summary judgment, securing dispositive victories on early motions practice, and bringing complicated cases to early and favorable resolutions for her clients. She has significant knowledge of all phases of litigation, including trying cases in first- and second-chair roles before a jury, bench, or arbitrator, preparing and deposing fact and expert witnesses, preparing and arguing discovery and dispositive motions, negotiating settlements in various forums, overseeing mock jury trials, and working with appellate experts to prepare or defend challenges at the highest levels of the judiciary.

“[Amy] matches her strong, direct, client-driven ethos for practicing law, with a willingness to collaborate that is beneficial to her clients, and truly extraordinary.”
Client, Chambers USA, 2024

Experience

  • Leads and directs the nationwide litigation strategy of class, collective, PAGA and single Plaintiff cases for a Fortune 150 retailer facing wage and hour, discrimination, sexual harassment, hostile work environment, retaliation, whistleblower, workplace safety, paid and unpaid leave, and Fair Credit Reporting Act claims.
  • Lead Counsel for a Fortune 150 company who faced over 8000 single plaintiff wage and hour arbitration claims pending before the American Arbitration Association.
  • Co- Lead Counsel for various financial service institutions facing thousands of individual mass arbitrations pending before the American Arbitration Association and JAMS.
  • Leads and directs internal investigations involving sexual harassment, discrimination, hostile work environment, whistleblower, misappropriation of trade secrets, retaliation, and alleged systemic wage and hour violations.
  • Defended multiple single plaintiff and putative class actions alleging interior and exterior accessibility issues in places of public accommodation.
  • Lead employment advisor to the membership of the Retail Litigation Center Defense Division. The Defense Division initiative is aimed to help retail corporate counsel identify mass action employment litigation risk on the front end and proactively implement strategies, policies, practices, procedures, and initiatives to combat that risk.
  • Creates and delivers management and employee training programs as part of Company compliance initiatives.
  • While serving in her corporate legal capacity, led a team that won a complete defense verdict in a certified class jury trial involving 5,400 retail employees alleging violations of California Labor Code requirements regarding electronic access to wage statements.
  • While serving in her corporate legal capacity, led multiple teams that won complete bench and jury defense verdicts in store manager retail exemption cases.
  • Lead counsel who secured a complete jury verdict in a multiday trial in Chesapeake, Virginia, on behalf of a lighting company facing allegations of civil assault and battery allegations under the doctrine of respondeat superior.
  • Defended hundreds of cases involving alleged sexual harassment and sexual misconduct in the workplace.
  • Defended hundreds of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cases at the state and federal agency levels for a large national retailer.

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