THOMPSON WIGDOR & GILLY LLP

Scott Browning Gilly is a founding partner of Thompson Wigdor & Gilly LLP.

His experience representing companies, as well as individual executives and employees, on the full range of employment law and related matters is broad and deep. Mr. Gilly regularly appears in federal and state courts in single-plaintiff, multi-plaintiff and class action discrimination suits and related employment litigation involving Title VII, Pregnancy Discrimination Act, Equal Pay Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, Age Discrimination in Employment Act, Fair Labor Standards Act, Section 1981, trade secrets, restrictive covenants and employment contracts. He is highly experienced in dealing with the intricacies of these laws and the agencies that administer them. He also handles securities industry arbitrations before FINRA, as well as administrative proceedings, mediations and other alternative dispute resolution (ADR) procedures before the EEOC and other federal and state government agencies.

In addition to employment litigation, Mr. Gilly has extensive experience advising employers and individual employees on the design, implementation and application of corporate personnel policies, employee handbooks, diversity programs, harassment prevention programs, and reductions-in-force, as well as the employment issues arising out of mergers, acquisitions and corporate reorganizations, employee terminations, and Family and Medical Leave Act and disability-related leaves of absence. Mr. Gilly has conducted numerous on-site investigations and client training seminars to address sensitive human resources and employee relations issues. He also regularly negotiates employment agreements, executive compensation agreements, limited liability partnership and company agreements, nonsolicitation and nondisclosure agreements, and covenants not to compete designed to protect trade secrets, intellectual property and other proprietary information.

Mr. Gilly has substantial collective bargaining, strike preparation, labor arbitration and union organizing experience in a wide array of industries, including professional sports, major motion picture and television production, commercial airlines, hospitality, telecommunications, retail, overnight air freight, transportation and major construction. He participates in the negotiation and administration of collective bargaining agreements and handles federal and state court labor injunction actions and litigation before the National Labor Relations Board.

Mr. Gilly also heads the firm's Sports and Entertainment Law Practice. He has maintained an active, life-long involvement in competitive sports, including a four-year intercollegiate basketball career at Harvard University. While at Harvard, Mr. Gilly was Captain of the Harvard University Basketball Team and served as an advisory committee member within the Harvard Department of Athletics and the Ivy League, which addressed compelling issues affecting NCAA student-athletes. As a practicing lawyer, Mr. Gilly has substantial experience in salary arbitration involving many of the highest profile clubs and players in Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League. He has also participated in counseling the owners of professional baseball and professional soccer franchises on the labor and antitrust issues concerning their collective bargaining relationship with players unions and their individual player and club salary contracting practices. In addition to his legal experience representing professional sports franchises, Mr. Gilly has represented other clients involved in the business of sports, as well as individual actors, performers, models, writers, producers, directors and executives in the motion picture, television and radio and other entertainment industries.

Since founding Thompson Wigdor & Gilly LLP, Mr. Gilly successfully represented a Major League club in arbitration before the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball in a player contract dispute arising out of a multi-player transaction among the Atlanta Braves, Florida Marlins and Colorado Rockies. Among his other notable management-side representations, Mr. Gilly has:

• represented a national retail pharmacy in high-stakes union injunction litigation in the Southern District of New York;
• handled the internal investigation of a director level employee for a national home improvement retail company headquartered outside of New York;
• defended a worldwide air express delivery company in numerous employment lawsuits;
• represented a number of firms in the financial services industry;
• defended a national assisted living facility in numerous employment lawsuits; and
• acted as in-house counsel to a prestigious university alumni club and its board of directors, including providing advice and counsel on all labor and employment related issues raised by staff and members.

Mr. Gilly has also served as pro bono counsel in the Southern District and Second Circuit Court of Appeals, most recently in labor law litigation on behalf of a low-income housing complex located in Harlem.

Some of Mr. Gilly's more notable representations of employees and executives include:

• numerous investment bankers;
• commodities traders and other Wall Street executives in litigation against their employers;
• negotiation of employment and separation agreements and the founding of their own funds and financial services companies;
• the chief executive officer of one of the largest and most prominent media conglomerates based in the United States;
• the chief financial officer of a major metropolitan area daily newspaper;
• a celebrity chef in connection with his restaurant, book, television and other business deals; and
• a motion picture producer in race discrimination claims against a major Hollywood studio.

Mr. Gilly also represented a prolific natural gas trader while providing testimony before the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, as well as a senior NASDAQ market maker while providing testimony before the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mr. Gilly has been an integral member of the trial team in every one of the firm's federal court employment law trials. His most recent successes at trial include a $1.2 million jury verdict in the Southern District of New York on behalf of the controller of Manhattan staffing agency who suffered severe racial and sexual harassment. Mr. Gilly also won a substantial arbitration award before FINRA on behalf of three Wall Street proprietary traders whose employer committed fraud and breach of contract in connection with their hiring, compensation and termination.

Prior to founding Thompson Wigdor & Gilly LLP, Mr. Gilly practiced law in both the New York and Washington, D.C. offices of Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP, one of the largest and most prominent management-side labor and employment law firms in the country. Establishing Thompson Wigdor & Gilly LLP has enabled him to fulfill his vision of bringing the full breadth and depth of expertise he developed representing many of the largest and best-known companies in the world to a much broader base of clients that includes individual executives and other employees in addition to emerging and established businesses of different sizes and in different industries.

Mr. Gilly is a graduate of Harvard University, where he earned his A.B. degree in psychology with a concentration on social and organizational behavior. He earned his J.D. degree from Catholic University School of Law in Washington, D.C., graduating in the top of his class. While in law school, Mr. Gilly was a published author and the Editor-in-Chief of the Catholic University Law Review.

Mr. Gilly is an active member of the Program Committee of the Federal Bar Council, where he has worked with prominent lawyers and jurists in presenting Continuing Legal Education Programs to the legal community at large. Mr. Gilly is also a member of the Labor and Employment Law and Sports and Entertainment Law Sections of the American Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

Mr. Gilly speaks and writes about labor and employment law issues as well as issues affecting the professional sports and entertainment industries. He is admitted to practice before the Southern, Eastern, and Northern Districts of New York, the Second and Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as being admitted to practice in Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., Connecticut, Virginia, and Maryland.