Major Cases
Williams Law Firm primarily handles complex commercial matters that affect large numbers of people. We have litigated cases in state and federal courts around the country, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Some of our major cases are outlined below.
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Williams Law Firm assembled and led a team of attorneys who fought a series of federal actions, and hundreds of individual arbitrations, on behalf of thousands of workers who alleged that their employer, a nationwide restaurant chain, made them work off the clock without pay. After eight years of litigation that included two collectives, several appeals, extensive discovery, and months of hard-nosed negotiations, our team obtained compensation for over 10,000 workers across the country.
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In coordination with a widely-watched jury trial of an Iowa class action against a major software company, we worked with local strategic communications consultants to formulate and implement a public relations campaign that countered the defendant's PR campaign, kept pressure on the defendant to change its business practices, and helped get the case settled.
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We brought an employment discrimination class action brought against Metro Transit, the local bus company, on behalf of a class of African-American bus drivers who alleged discriminatory application of certain policies and procedures, and persuaded the company to make significant changes to its procedures and submit to five years of court-supervised monitoring.
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In North Carolina, in a case of first impression, Hyde v. Abbott Laboratories, 123 N.C. App. 572, 473 S.E.2d 680, rev. denied, 344 N.C. 734, 478 S.E.2d 5 (1996), Kent successfully argued that North Carolina's antitrust statute allows a consumer to sue for price-fixing even if the consumer did not buy directly from the defendant. This ruling, which has been affirmed numerous times, gives North Carolina consumers the right to sue for anticompetitive overcharges on products, regardless of whether they dealt with the defendant directly.
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We worked with conservation experts, engineers, developers, and city and county officials to win city council approval of an innovative conservation development plan that re-zones a large section of land, preserves hundreds of acres of valuable woods and other natural habitat from development, and rewards our client, a local landowner, with a significant increase in building density.
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In a high-profile case involving the University of Minnesota's Anti-Lymphocyte Globulin (MALG) program, which allegedly charged for an investigational drug for 20 years without FDA approval, Kent led the defense of a world-famous surgeon against a series of regulatory actions brought by the Department of Justice, Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, and the University of Minnesota. Kent handled all of the regulatory proceedings, managed public communications about the matter, and was able to resolve the regulatory claims in coordination with separate criminal proceedings. The doctor was acquitted on all counts and continued to practice for decades until he retired.