Adam T. Klein
Employment Class Actions · Wage & Hour · Worker Civil Rights
“I advocate for employees who understand something is wrong, and have the principles and sense of obligation to address the issue.
The Civil Rights Architecture of Work
Adam T. Klein has spent more than three decades building employment class actions around wage theft, discriminatory hiring and pay systems, and the barriers that keep workers from asserting rights together.
Employment Law as Civil Rights
Adam T. Klein litigates employment law as what it has always been at bottom — a field of civil rights. Over three decades at Outten & Golden, the New York firm he now leads as managing partner, his class actions have spanned gender and race discrimination, unpaid wages, immigration-based exploitation, military status, and the employment consequences of government policy. His clients have included immigrant delivery men pushing grocery carts through Manhattan for a dollar an hour, women vice presidents at a major investment bank, and hundreds of thousands of Americans who applied for temporary Census work. Across those cases, Klein's focus is whether workers can safely assert a right together and what the law can do when they cannot.
Klein came to that work after earning a B.A. from Cornell, a J.D. from Hofstra, and taking on cases many lawyers avoided. One of his first major matters, in the 1990s, was brought on behalf of more than a thousand immigrant grocery-delivery workers — men treated as invisible by the payroll systems of the stores they served, some earning roughly a dollar an hour. The litigation produced millions in back pay and ongoing fair-pay and benefits terms, and established a pattern in his practice: for workers at the bottom of the economy, reaching the courthouse can be a civil-rights struggle in its own right.
Thirteen Years Against Goldman Sachs
In 2010, Cristina Chen-Oster, a former Goldman Sachs vice president, filed suit alleging that the bank's evaluation, promotion, and pay practices systematically disadvantaged women. Chen-Oster v. Goldman Sachs lasted thirteen years, through class-certification disputes, arbitration challenges, and statistical analysis of how the bank evaluated and paid employees. Klein helped lead the case, alongside co-counsel, to a $215 million settlement for approximately 2,800 women associates and vice presidents, granted final approval in 2023. The agreement paired compensation with independent expert review of the bank's performance-evaluation and pay-equity processes and other forward-looking measures.
In Gonzalez v. Pritzker, Klein's team challenged the Census Bureau's use of criminal-history records to screen applicants for the 2010 decennial count — a process that swept aside hundreds of thousands of people, disproportionately Black and Latino, often over decades-old arrests that had never led to conviction. The litigation ended with a $15 million resolution covering more than 450,000 applicants and changes to how the agency handles criminal-background screening for the country's largest periodic hiring effort. Public Justice honored the trial team with its Trial Lawyer of the Year Award for the case.
Attacking the Barriers Around the Claim
Klein's litigation also focuses on the architecture surrounding a legal claim — the machinery that decides whether a right on paper is usable in life. Retaliation fears, forced arbitration clauses, uncertain class status, and employer control of the records can each render a protection theoretical. Klein litigates those obstacles as deliberately as the underlying violations, treating procedure as substance. His docket has included workers whose vulnerability came from economic dependence, language barriers, or uncertainty about legal status, along with servicemembers whose military obligations cost them ground in their civilian careers. In Liapes v. Facebook, his firm's clients allege that the design of the platform's advertising system steered financial-services ads away from women and older users, carrying workplace civil-rights law into the algorithmic systems that now mediate economic opportunity.
Outside his cases, Klein has testified before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on criminal-history screening and automated employment systems. He serves on the board of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, where he previously served as a board co-chair, and sits on advisory boards for Cornell University's labor and employment law program and its Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution. He is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers and a longtime member of the National Employment Lawyers Association.
Running the Firm That Runs the Cases
As managing partner of Outten & Golden, a firm devoted entirely to representing workers, Klein helps decide how the firm commits its lawyers and resources. Class actions against defendants like Goldman Sachs can require years of investment in statisticians, economists, and document review on an industrial scale. A firm's ability to sustain that work affects which claims can be brought and maintained.
Across Klein's cases, a delivery worker's stolen wages and a vice president's suppressed compensation reflect the same legal problem: an imbalance of power converted into an economic outcome. By litigating the procedural obstacles rather than treating them as background, he has used class actions across industries and income levels that share little except that imbalance. His work treats employment law as civil-rights law applied to wages, hiring, promotion, and access to collective enforcement.