Manage Danielle has been a licensed attorney since 2002. In 2006, Danielle became a full-time mediator and arbitrator. She has arbitrated and mediated hundreds of cases involving a broad range of labor and employment law issues, including classification systems; discipline, demotion, and discharge; employment discrimination; employee monitoring technology; free speech; hiring practices; insurance benefits; layoffs; leave benefits; overtime pay; pension plans; the use of social media; subcontracting; and workplace violence. The industries in which she has worked include the following: communications, corrections, courthouse, education (primary, secondary, and post-secondary), electrical equipment, appliances, metal fabrication, arts and entertainment, hospitals, nursing homes, office and clerical, police, fire, public safety dispatch, public works, refrigeration / HVAC, social services, utilities, sewage districts, and labor organizations.
Danielle’s experience and reputation as a neutral have qualified her for inclusion on the panels of many national- and state-based, public and private organizations that provide professional arbitration and mediation services. She has gained admission to panels maintained by the American Arbitration Association; the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service; the National Mediation Board; the Financial Industry Regulator Authority; and the States of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.
In the past, Danielle has provided legal representation to both employers and employees regarding employment and labor law matters. She represented employees and labor unions in private practice; and she served as Chief Legal Counsel of the agency that establishes and oversees personnel management policies for the dozens of subdivisions and 70,000 employees of the State of Wisconsin.
In these roles, Danielle worked with a wide range of employment issues, such as recruitment, testing, and selection processes; compensation; job classification systems; performance evaluation systems; discipline and discharge standards, procedures, and legal challenges; insurance and retirement benefits; affirmative action and equal employment opportunities programs; employment discrimination protection and defense; personnel file management systems; employee monitoring and privacy considerations; unemployment and worker’s compensation claims; negotiations and enforcement of individual employment contracts; compliance with state and federal regulations in the areas of wages and hours, family and medical leave, and collective bargaining; and federal regulations such as HIPAA, ERISA, and PPACA.
Danielle also is experienced at designing and implementing organizational restructurings and process improvements. She has overseen a full-scale government agency reorganization that required the incorporation of new areas of responsibility; position reductions and work redistribution; a series of coordinated communications with affected internal staff and external stakeholders; office space redesign and expansion; and brand redevelopment. She also played a key leadership role in the creation, marketing, and staged implementation of a statewide process improvement program for employee recruitment and hiring. She designed and implemented a new structure for providing legal representation in employee discipline cases, and in doing so recruited and trained a staff of attorneys; coordinated and conducted client listening and marketing sessions; and built internal operational procedures for every aspect of the new practice. She also designed and oversaw the implementation of a structure to manage, between multiple organizations, an IT conversion that consolidated several separate human capital management systems into a single, modernized system. Additionally, she devised and managed the implementation of process redesigns mandated by legislative changes; and, in the wake of significant changes to Wisconsin’s public sector collective bargaining law, she organized a statewide survey distributed to 500 stakeholders and a follow-up conference of 300 attendees.
Danielle is a practitioner member of the Wisconsin Association of Mediators, a member of the James E. Doyle Inns of Court, and a member of the Labor and Employment Relations Association. She also is a member of the American Bar Association Alternative Dispute Resolution Section and the Labor and Employment Law Section, as well as the ABA Committee on Federal Labor Regulations Legislation and the ABA Committee on State and Local Government Bargaining and Employment Law. She is a member of the Wisconsin State Bar, former Chair and current member of the Labor Employment Law Section, and a member of the Alternative Dispute Resolution Section.
Danielle regularly teaches and speaks on matters related to labor and employment law, mediation, arbitration, and concepts of neutrality. Most recently, she taught labor and employment law in the fall of 2016 as an adjunct professor for the University of Wisconsin Law School.