Phillips & Associates, an employment-only litigation firm representing employees across New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Florida, has been ranked in the 2026 Chambers USA Guide for Labor & Employment: Mainly Plaintiffs in New York. The recognition points to the firm's record representing employees in harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and high-profile employment matters.

Chambers characterized the practice as a well-regarded plaintiff-side employment firm and highlighted its work in harassment, discrimination, and high-profile litigation. The guide also credited the team's business judgment, commercial awareness, practical legal analysis, integrity, and compassion toward clients.

For founder William K. Phillips, the ranking reflects the model the firm has followed since it opened in November 2011: employees only, employment law only, and cases built around workplace power, retaliation, and accountability.

A Plaintiff-Side Practice Built Around Power Dynamics

The firm represents employees exclusively and says it has never acted for employers or management. Its caseload spans workplace sexual harassment, discrimination, retaliation, whistleblower retaliation, hostile work environment claims, pregnancy discrimination, medical leave and accommodation disputes, wage issues, and related matters.

Since 2011, the firm reports recovering more than $360 million for employees across roughly 2,000 employment cases, including more than $60 million recovered in 2025. Its attorneys have appeared before over 110 U.S. District Judges and more than 70 U.S. Magistrate Judges.

Its current positioning centers on a category it has long handled: workplace power dynamics. These matters typically involve supervisors, executives, business owners, physicians, law firm partners, founders, and managers who control compensation, assignments, schedules, promotions, discipline, reputation, accommodations, or continued employment. In many of them, the legal question is less about whether inappropriate conduct occurred and more about how authority was used.

Workplace Relationships, Harassment, and Retaliation

According to Phillips, many sexual harassment cases no longer open with an explicit demand or a stranger's crude remark. They more often begin with blurred boundaries and unequal authority — a supervisor texting late at night, a managing partner repeatedly pressing an associate for dinner, an employer who gradually erodes professional distance until refusal stops feeling like a genuine option.

Employees frequently describe such situations as consensual at the outset. Phillips argues the legal analysis is more complicated: when one party controls compensation, assignments, promotion opportunities, reputation, or job security, the real question is whether the employee ever felt free to say no.

Recurring patterns cited by the firm include managers who reward personal attention with better shifts or assignments, and employers whose treatment of an employee shifts sharply once a relationship ends or a complaint is filed. Retaliation may then surface as lost assignments, reduced hours, sudden negative reviews, exclusion from meetings, denied bonuses or promotions, pressure to resign, or termination.

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High-Profile Matters and Litigation Record

The Chambers listing also reflects work in sensitive matters involving public figures, major institutions, financial firms, and entertainment companies. Publicly reported cases handled by firm attorneys include federal suits in the Southern District of New York and a New York Adult Survivors Act claim, along with Caruso-Jones v. RBC Capital Markets, a federal pregnancy and gender discrimination suit brought by a former managing director. Several of these are led by Partner Michelle Caiola. All allegations in pending matters remain allegations unless and until proven in court.

Rather than building around a single public-facing lawyer, the firm assigns dedicated litigation teams led by a partner or senior litigator and supported by an associate and paralegal, with the same team staying on a case through negotiation, mediation, discovery, motion practice, trial, or appeal. It has litigated against more than 550 management-side defense firms.

Published decisions in its record include Vasquez v. Empress Ambulance Service, in which the Second Circuit adopted the cat's paw theory of retaliation and extended it to nonsupervisory employees, and Roberts v. Genting New York, which revived WARN Act claims for 177 employees. Trial results include a $1.8 million federal jury verdict in Pardovani v. Crown Building Maintenance.

Business Judgment and Trauma-Informed Representation

Chambers' remarks on commercial awareness align with the firm's handling of executive and high-earner disputes. Before founding the practice, Phillips worked in investment banking and international mergers and acquisitions, including as a vice president at a New York investment bank — background that informs matters involving compensation, equity, deferred compensation, severance, bonuses, and executive exits.

The firm also emphasizes trauma-informed communication in cases involving harassment, coercion, and misconduct by people in authority, with the aim of helping clients understand their rights and preserve evidence before an employer or HR department controls the record. Phillips additionally founded the National Plaintiffs' Summit on Sexual Harassment and Employment Discrimination, a conference focused on training plaintiff-side employment lawyers. The firm works on contingency, charging no attorney fees unless it recovers for the client.