Davis+Gilbert LLP

Labor + Employment

Partner

Jessica Golden Cortes provides clients with comprehensive employment counsel, ensures their regulatory compliance, and resolves workplace disputes when they arise. Her clients include businesses of all sizes from startups to established multinational corporations in industries such as advertising, marketing public relations, finance, fintech and architecture, and nonprofit religious and education-focused organizations.

Jessica is well known for her ability to analyze issues from a legal, practical and business perspective and for devising creative, cost-effective solutions to workplace issues. Business managers and human resources professionals rely on her for guidance on day-to-day issues such as hiring, terminations, reductions in workforce, restrictive covenants, wage and hour issues, federal and state family and medical leave laws, and a host of other employment-related matters. She drafts customized employment policies and handbooks, and structures and enforces employment and separation agreements.

Clients from across the nation call on Jessica to conduct employment trainings on respect in the workplace, diversity, equity and inclusion, eliminating unconscious bias, manager best practices, and many other topics. When issues arise, Jessica manages internal investigations of employee complaints, represents her clients in hearings before administrative agencies, and asserts and defends their interests in federal and state courts, and in mediation and arbitration proceedings. Jessica has prevailed in wide-ranging employment cases including race, sex, age, disability, failure to hire, and other discrimination cases, and breach of contract disputes.

Recognizing that avoiding problems in the first instance is the best strategy, Jessica crafts client-specific workplace policies and procedures, and works proactively with clients to help them foster a work environment where employees thrive, workplace conflicts are addressed constructively, and the risk of employee claims is minimized.

Fordham University School of Law, J.D., 2001; Wesleyan University, B.A., with high honors, 1998