The Real Lawyer: Wayne Outten (Part 1)

In this episode of The Real Lawyer Podcast, Joyce Sophia chats with Wayne Outten, a pioneer in labor and employment law and founding partner of Outten and Golden. Wayne shares his inspiring journey from small-town Maryland to leading the legal field, his role in founding the National Employment Lawyers Association, and his work with Workplace Fairness. Don’t miss this insightful conversation about his early years, law school path, and the evolution of employment law in the U.S.!

Transcript

Joyce Sophia Xu (00:03.118)
Welcome to the Real Lawyer podcast, where we get real about life, working in law, and everything in between. We have a very special guest with us today, Mr. Wayne Outen. Wayne is a true giant and the trailblazer in the field of labor and employment law. And we are truly honored to have him on our show.

Joyce Sophia Xu (00:36.782)
Hi Wayne, welcome to the real lawyer. Good morning Joyce, I'm pleased to be here. Wayne, as I said in our intro, you are a true trailblazer in the field of labor and employment. You are the chair and founding partner of Alton and Golden, an employment law firm you established in 1998, and you've built it into the top U.S. law firm that's dedicated to representing employees.

You're also the leader of the employment law bar from what I understand. So I'd love it if you could give us an overview of the different leadership roles that you've taken on over those years. Well, I founded Outlander Golden in 1998 when I was 50 years old. But before that, I was involved in creating a number of other important institutions.

One was in 1985, I was a founding director of the National Employment Lawyers Association. And I was on the founding board of that organization for 11 years. And then in 1986, I founded the New York affiliate called the National Employment Lawyers Association of New York. I was the president of that affiliate for 16 years until 2002. And we built it into

a very important and powerful and impactful bar association in the New York area, including many, many great programs and activities. In 1994, I was co-founder with Paul Tobias, who was the principal founder of Neela, of a not-for-profit organization called Workplace Fairness. And Workplace Fairness was created to educate workers about their rights and to advocate for improved employment rights.

and our principal activity of Workplace Fairness is a website called workplacefairness.org, which is a comprehensive free website setting forth in plain non-jargon English the rights that workers have nationally and locally. And in addition, I was and am an active member of the ABA Labor and Employment Law Section for more than 40 years.

Joyce Sophia Xu (02:58.873)
And 10 years or so ago, I was the chair of that section. And I continue to be active in that sector. Wow. Thank you. That's so impressive. You've been a leader in the labor and employment area for many decades. So we're truly honored to have you on our show. I want to spend some time really delving into the story of Alton and Golden. But before we get to that, I'd love to first learn more about

where you grew up and what shaped you and led you to law school in the first place. Well, that's of course is a long story. I had the good fortune to be raised in a wonderful little town called Pocomoke City, in the lower part of Worcester County, Maryland. My family has lived in this county for 350 years. They've all been farmers until my father's generation.

That's where I live now. After 50 years in New York, I have moved back to Worcester County. And as I tell people, I returned to my roots. I had the good fortune to grow up into a wonderful, large family. I have 41st cousins and I'm the oldest of five children. And my parents were wonderful folks. But it was, of course, a small town.

I got a fine education, but it was somewhat sheltered in many ways. And then I went off to college in 1966 to Drexel University in Philadelphia. And I was destined to get a business degree, which I did. And I was supposed to go back into the family business in Pocomoke City. My father and several brothers of his had created after World War II, a chain of furniture, appliance and carpeting stores on the Delmarva Peninsula.

and I was supposed to take over as the oldest son of my father's store. But the late 60s were a tumultuous time. I was paying attention to what was happening in the world while I was in college. There was the Civil Rights Movement, very active, the anti-war movement. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Robert Kennedy was assassinated. And that and...

Joyce Sophia Xu (05:25.438)
other things while I was in college opened my eyes to a much broader perspective about things. And I gradually decided that returning to Pocomoke City and running the family business was not really what I wanted to do. I wanted to find a way to do something socially useful and helpful beyond selling furniture. And I noticed that the people that were out there in the world

making a big difference in the things that were going on at that time, seemed to be mostly preachers and lawyers. And I knew I didn't want to be a preacher. So I decided to become a lawyer because it seemed like lawyers somehow figured out how to be involved in making things happen and changing the world. without knowing much more about lawyering than that, I didn't even know any lawyers other than the

professor at Drexel who taught business law. I enrolled in law school and I ended up going to NYU law school because it had a reputation then and still does of course as one of the best public interest law schools in the country. I had the good fortune to become an Arthur Garfield Hayes Civil Liberties Fellow while I was there and met one of my great mentors, Norman Dorson.

who was the president of the American Civil Liberties Union and also the leader of the Arthur Garfield-Hey Civil Liberties Program. And by virtue of all that, I was committed to a public interest law career. I didn't know exactly where, when, and how, but I knew that that's what I wanted to do. And after law school,

I clerked for a wonderful judge in Portland, Oregon named Gus J. Solomon, who taught me a lot about a lot of things, including how to write well. And then I taught law school at NYU for a couple of years. And I became a little bit of a liaison to the Arthur Garfield Hay Civil Abuse Program then from the teacher perspective. And as I was finishing that two-year stint teaching at NYU, Norman asked me to write a book.

Joyce Sophia Xu (07:48.947)
a series of books called The Rights of that the ACLU published. The Rights of Gays, the Rights of Women, the Rights of Others. And long story short, I chose to write a book on the rights of employees. After spending some time in the library, I realized that there really wasn't much out there in layman's language about the rights of employees in the United States. So I then embarked on a five year,

five-year process while I was practicing law of writing a book called The Rights of Employees, 500-page book that came out in 1984. And that's how I became an employment lawyer representing employees. Well, five years of your free time while you were practicing law full-time, that's real dedication, Wayne. It really sounds like you were someone, by the time you were...

getting into law school, you already had a very clear vision and purpose. And I'm curious with that kind of clarity, then how did you approach picking your classes and how did you decide on what kind of programs to get involved with that eventually led to writing the book and the various opportunities that you just talked about?

Well, while I was in law school, which was 1971 to 74, I did not then know that I was going to be an employment lawyer representing employees. So I didn't take any courses in law school about employment law or labor law. really? In fact, I'm not even sure there were any courses at that time on employment law. there were, I wasn't aware of it. I just knew I wanted to do some kind of public interest work.

And as I mentioned, Norman Dorson, a noted, actually famous professor at NYU Law School, became a mentor of mine and he helped me along the way many ways, many times. And when I wrote the book on the rights of employees, that's when I became an employment lawyer. But that was already five years after I was out of law school. So that didn't influence the courses I took in law school.

Joyce Sophia Xu (10:14.057)
What I did take in law school was courses about civil litigation, anticipating that whatever I did in the public interest arena, I would probably be doing lots of litigation. And related courses, of course, like evidence and civil procedure, and some courses on negotiation and things like that. They had a clinic on civil rights litigation, and I took that clinic.

I was positioned to do some kind of public interest work, but I didn't know just what until I ended up writing this book on the rights of employees. I see. So you took courses that prepared you well for a career as a litigator and then working on the book on the rights of employees really inspired you to become an employment lawyer.

And the timing of all of that was kind of perfect also, right? All of that was happening during this very important period in our country's history. Well, that's exactly right. well, before 1964, for sure, there was no body of law called employment law at all. You had labor law, and then starting in the 60s, you had civil rights law with

Title VII and other civil rights statutes. And there was an overlap in the area of employment law because of course the Title VII covered discrimination in employment among other things. And then gradually during the 70s, this new field of employment law began to take shape. There was the age discrimination law of 1967. There was ERISA in 1974. There were other

statutes and then states started passing statutes, anti-discrimination statutes. Actually, some of them already had, New York had an anti-discrimination statute back in the late 50s, I think. And also parallel to all that, there was a lot of activity in the state courts about exceptions to employment at will because the baseline in employment until the 70s without any

Joyce Sophia Xu (12:40.423)
substantial question was employment at will in every state in the country. so lawyers around the country started challenging employment at will in the courts on various grounds. I won't go into the details of all that. And I did that in New York. In fact, I brought one of the last big cases in New York. It was against a Sterling Drug Company, Sabatay, Sabatay versus Sterling Drug Company, which I lost.

in 1987, that was the last of the cases in the chain of cases in New York of challenging employment at will, and we lost all those cases. And so that was the end of challenges to employment at will in New York. But meanwhile, similar things were going on in other states, and in many other states, the courts were more receptive to creating exceptions to employment at will, particularly in California and also New Jersey. So anyway, without going into further detail,

This was a busy time in the 70s and 80s in the creation and growth and building of this field of employment law. And in fact, before that, the ABA section of labor and employment law was known as the section of labor law. it was only in the beginning of that era that the name of the section was changed to labor and employment law.

So I happened to be at the right place at the right time to be part of that evolution. And related to that was the creation of NILA, the National Employment Lawyers Association in 1985. That was at the impetus of Paul Tobias, who was the founder and spiritual leader, or was, he's deceased now, of NILA. He had a vision of creating a bar association of foreign by lawyers who represented employees.

And so in 1985, he called together a small group of people, I happened to be one of them, to create this new bar association. And it was a seminal event. And now, NEILA is a very important and major bar association with thousands of members around the country, as well as 66 chapters or affiliates around the country. And it has a major impact on the practice of lawyers who represent employees. It has a major impact on

Joyce Sophia Xu (15:06.879)
the clients of all of those lawyers because they're able to better serve their clients because of NILA. And it has set a major impact on the law, both national and state law, by the advocacy and actions and lobbying of the NILA lawyers. Well, how exciting it must have been to be at the right place at the right time, as you said, to be part of the revolution. The legal landscape of

labor employment law was quickly evolving and there you were a young lawyer with all the right talent who had heard the calling to hone your skills and become a leader in this field. So then with the writing of the book on the rights of employees, was that the turning point for you to start representing employees exclusively? Have you actually worked on any cases?

for employers since you wrote the book? Well, I confess, in very early 80s, I did represent a few employers from the firm that I was then an associate and eventually a partner of. I had the really good fortune in 1979 to get hired as an associate at a firm called Lankenau-Cudmer in Bickford.

And again, Norman Dorsen played a key role because I was complaining to him that I was looking for a great liberal civil rights oriented law firm and I couldn't find it. And he said, I have just the place for you. And he steered me to the law firm where his wife Harriet was an associate. And I was the sixth lawyer in the firm. And I practiced with Harriet.

Lankenau, Covner, and Bickford who were wonderful people. And it was a civil practice, a lot of litigation in the civil side, including a major area of practice being media law representing broadcasters and newspapers and magazines. And I did practice in the field of media law with them. Victor Covner was the leader of that practice. And I did litigate.

Joyce Sophia Xu (17:28.893)
all kinds of matters for media companies, including defending a few of the media companies in the early days in the area of employment law. But that gradually ended because I decided I just wanted to represent employees. But I stayed with that firm, a wonderful firm with wonderful lawyers, and I loved the lawyers there, and they're still good friends, until 1998, almost 20 years.

I was gradually steering away from anything other than representing employees so that by 1990, that was all I was doing was representing employees. And I wasn't doing any more litigation in any other areas, including media law after 1990. And then as wonderful as that firm was, I was getting impatient with the fact that

I was not able to build the kind of law practice that I really wanted to build. They were very supportive of everything I did, including all my time and effort and expense incurred in being a founder and leader of NEALA National and NEALA New York and the ABA Labor and Employment Law Section. They supported me in all those things, but I couldn't get the ability to hire more help, more associates in my practice.

Although I was able to hire Anne Golden, who became my partner in the 90s and she became my right-hand person in my law practice. And then in 1998 along came the opportunity to create my own law firm, which was precipitated by the fact that the firm that I was with was merging with a larger firm, Davis-Royd-Termaine.

And I didn't want to be part of a big firm that, among other things, represented employers. So with that sort of impetus, I did something that I had been thinking about and talking about for some time, which was to launch my own law firm. And Anne Golden came with me. And as of September 1, 1998, we started Alton and Golden. Wow. What a journey already up to that point.

Joyce Sophia Xu (19:52.183)
and it only became much bigger, much more fulfilling, it sounds like, since then. Well, yeah, I had a vision, a very explicit vision, not just a vague idea, but a goal to create the best and probably the largest law firm in the country that represented employees. There wasn't a firm in existence at that time like

Outland and Golden is now. There were a few, mostly it was solo practitioners and small law firms. There were a few firms that had as many as eight or 10 or maybe 12 lawyers scattered around, very few, including Judy Vladeck's firm in New York City. Judy was a, early civil rights, employee rights, especially gender discrimination rights lawyer in the field. She was a pioneer.

and she's long deceased, but the firm continues. Anyway, I had the idea of creating a firm that was big enough, good enough.

sufficiently resourced and funded that we could take on any employer, no matter how big, and any law firm, no matter how big, and we could go toe to toe and never have to back down. And that's what we did.

Joyce Sophia Xu (21:27.825)
Thank you so much for listening to part one of my conversation with Wayne Norton. Tune in on Wednesday for part two to hear about the inspiring path Wayne took to turn his vision into a reality. Until then, be well and be happy.