Vedder Price

Traditional Labor Labor & Employment

Shareholder

Mr. Sparks is a Shareholder with over 25 years of experience in labor and employment matters.

He represents and advises private and public employers across a broad range of industries, with extensive experience working with health care organizations, in complicated labor law and litigation matters nationwide. Among his areas of concentration are union organizing and collective bargaining, including development and implementation of integrated responses to all of the litigation, publicity and strike matters that can and often do become a part of organizing and collective bargaining. He has negotiated numerous collective bargaining agreements, tried cases before the National Labor Relations Board, handled organizing and decertification campaigns and related litigation, managed injunction and other legal issues growing out of nationwide and local strikes, quelled unlawful secondary boycott campaigns and handled numerous labor-related litigation matters in state and federal courts.

Mr. Sparks also has extensive experience handling employment matters before federal and state courts and agencies, and counseling employers on how to avoid such litigation. His areas of practice include a wide variety of Title VII, ADEA, FMLA, ADA duty of fair representation and related discrimination lawsuits and noncompete agreement disputes, workplace defamation actions and wrongful-discharge matters.

Member, Bar of the District of Columbia Member, American Bar Association Member, Trial Bar for the Northern District of Illinois

University of Michigan Law School, J.D., 1989, magna cum laude, Order of the Coif Massachusetts Institute of Technology, B.S., 1986, Truman Scholar