Parisis G. Filippatos

Before dedicating his career to plaintiff-side employment law, Mr. Filippatos provided strategic advise to myriad corporations on employment issues including, but not limited to, drafting employee handbooks, enforcement of workplace policies and procedures, investigations of employment discrimination or sexual harassment and assault, human resources management, organizational structure, employee benefits, labor relations, and regulatory compliance.

Mr. Filippatos now draws upon his extensive experience advising management in workplace disputes to effectively counsel individuals who have been subjected to discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and other forms of workplace misconduct.

A dedicated and industrious advocate for justice in the workplace, Mr. Filippatos is a longtime member of the American Bar Association’s Labor & Employment Law and Litigation Sections and the National Employment Lawyers Association (“NELA”) and NELA’s New York Chapter.

Mr. Filippatos has handled several high‐profile matters that have garnered significant, and often national, media attention. He and his cases have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters, CNBC, Forbes, Business Insider, Institutional Investor, HuffPost, The Guardian, New York Magazine, New York Post, Gothamist, Law360, Society for Human Resource Management, Employee Benefit News, Reuters, CNN, and many other established media outlets. Due to his work handling prominent employment discrimination and sexual harassment cases, Mr. Filippatos has appeared on the cover of U.S. Business News.

During the firm’s work on Abby Grossberg’s case, Mr. Filippatos appeared in many media interviews, including MSNBC’s Deadline Whitehouse, Anderson Cooper 360, and CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront.

Mr. Filippatos is also an author and lecturer on various employment-related subjects such as reductions in force, case assessment, whistleblower protection, age discrimination, family and medical leave, violence in the workplace, litigation tactics and strategies, and EEOC administrative procedures and ethics.

He has presented at various national legal conferences, including the NELA Annual Convention, and has conducted legal seminars for the American Conference Institute and the Practicing Law Institute. Mr. Filippatos has also published articles about workplace sexual harassment and assault in the #MeToo era and other employment-related issues in The Employee Advocate, Recruiter.com and various other legal journals and websites.

While the vast majority of matters litigated by Mr. Filippatos on behalf of plaintiffs have resulted in confidential, out-of-court settlements totaling in the tens of millions of dollars, Mr. Filippatos’s notable public cases include:

• Served as principal litigator in a landmark gender discrimination and unequal pay case against Morgan Stanley, which resulted in a settlement of $54 million (one of the largest public settlements for a glass ceiling case) and appeared on the front page of The New York Times.
• Represented a former junior trader in a sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation lawsuit against SAC Capital Advisors LLC in connection with a novel fact pattern alleging that a supervising trader required the plaintiff to take female hormones and wear feminine attire as part of an employee training program.
• Led the Filippatos PLLC team in historic lawsuits against the Fox News Network, which resulted in a $12 million settlement for client Abby Grossberg. The suits alleged that the news network operated a hostile and discriminatory workplace, and that Grossberg was ordered to provide false testimony in another lawsuit against the network. The case was covered extensively by several national news networks.

Mr. Filippatos was born and raised in New York City, migrating along the Hudson from Hell’s Kitchen, to the Upper Westside, to Riverdale, before settling in White Plains, New York and Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Upon graduating from law school in 1991, Mr. Filippatos served as Assistant Corporation Counsel in the New York City Law Department, where he litigated Section 1983 and Title VII cases.

After spending nearly a decade practicing management-side employment law at two boutique law firms, Mr. Filippatos became a founding member of one of the largest plaintiff-side employment law firms in the country before starting his own plaintiff-side practice in 2004.

Just prior to resuming his career as a plaintiff-side employment lawyer four years ago, Mr. Filippatos was in-house counsel for five years for a jointly trusteed labor-management organization where he advised on strategic issues, such as regulatory compliance and organizational structure, while also teaching governmental and labor studies to union apprentices as an Adjunct Professor at Empire State College.

From 2017 through 2019, Mr. Filippatos was a partner at one of the largest plaintiff-side employment law firms in New York City; in 2020, Mr. Filippatos migrated as a partner to a preeminent competitor firm before deciding to re-establish Filippatos PLLC in 2021.

Mr. Filippatos received his Juris Doctor from Boston College Law School, where he was the Solicitations Editor of the Boston College Third World Law Journal. He graduated cum laude with a B.A. in Political Science from Columbia University, where he received the G.W. Hibbitt Award for Excellence in Public Speaking and numerous merit scholarships.

• New York
• Connecticut
• U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York
• U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York
• U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York
• U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit

Gerry is fluent in Modern Greek. When he’s not negotiating or litigating, Gerry enjoys the cinema; hiking; live music; spending time with his wife, five adult children, select friends, and two dogs; as well as rooting for his beloved NY (“Let’s Go”) Mets!