The Daily Journal has recognized WilmerHale in its annual Top Verdicts feature for the firm’s pro bono victory for United Farm Workers (UFW) and the UFW Foundation.

In April 2022, a pro bono team of WilmerHale attorneys, led by Partner Mark Selwyn, achieved a significant win for UFW and the UFW Foundation when Judge Dale A. Drozd of the Eastern District of California granted our clients’ motion for summary judgment and vacated a rule that threatened to reduce the wages of hundreds of thousands of farmworkers.

The rule would have canceled the biannual Farm Labor Survey of farmworker employment statistics and wages that it had been conducting for over 100 years. Additionally, the rule would have frozen farmworkers wages for two years and then slowed wage increases going forward, which would have disadvantaged over 300,000 farmworkers and resulted in aggregate wage losses to farmworkers of more than $500 million.

In WilmerHale’s profile, Selwyn, who co-chairs the firm’s Intellectual Property Litigation Practice Group, said that it would be “a cruel irony indeed that while farmworkers are relied upon to keep the nation's food supply moving, the food security of their own households is threatened by this rule.”

The WilmerHale team representing UFW and the UFW Foundation includes Mark Selwyn, Gregory Lantier, Derek Woodman, Taylor Gooch, Phillip Takhar, Nick Werle and Taryn McCarthy and former WilmerHale attorneys Rachel Jacobson and Tico Almeida.