Partner, Balch & Bingham LLP
General Counsel to the Mississippi Manufacturers Association, Pepper Crutcher advises and advocates for a wide range of Southeast U.S., private sector employers. Pepper regularly defends employment litigation, including class and collective actions, and both defends and prosecutes unfair competition claims. Pepper’s labor law practice involves all types of NLRB proceedings, labor contract negotiation and arbitration. Pepper also helps employers, insurers, brokers, administrators and providers achieve Affordable Care Act compliance and appeal ACA tax assessments.
Mr. Crutcher has been rated "AV" by Martindale Hubbell and since 2004 has been selected to be included in Chambers USA America's Leading Lawyers for Business: The Client's Guide (Employment, Mississippi). He is also listed in The Best Lawyers in America for Intellectual Property Law and Labor & Employment Law.
Shareholder & Co-Chair of the Workplace Policy Institute, Littler Mendelson P.C.
Alexander T. MacDonald advises employers on all aspects of the employment and labor landscape, focusing on emerging legislation and regulation. He has extensive experience advising businesses on worker classification, arbitration, the administrative and regulatory process, and the future of work. He frequently writes, publishes, and speaks on these subjects. His work has been cited by scholars and appellate courts. He is a recognized voice for the management perspective.
Alexander is a co-chair of the Workplace Policy Institute (WPI) team. With WPI, he advises employers on legislative, administrative, and regulatory developments at the state and federal level. He advocates for employers in the regulatory and administrative process. He also helps employers protect their businesses by understanding and anticipating cutting-edge legal developments.
Alexander also has extensive experience in traditional labor law. He represents management in all aspects of labor-management relations, including unfair labor practice charges, grievance arbitrations, representation elections, contract negotiations, and related litigation, including litigation in the U.S. courts of appeals.
Before joining Littler, Alexander served as the director, future of work, for a major technology company. He also worked in a national labor and employment law firm and a major public-sector general counsel’s office. He was a law clerk to the senior judges in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
He is also a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. He served in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. In law school, he graduated first in his class
Tammy McCutchen is a leading authority on federal and state wage-hour laws and prevailing wage laws. She counsels businesses on wage-hour compliance, including conducting internal audits on independent contractor status, overtime exemptions, and other pay practices. She also represents employers during investigations by the U.S. Department of Labor and serves as an expert witness in wage-hour class actions. She was a founding officer of ComplianceHR, a law and technology company, where she created AI-based applications to evaluate independent contractor and overtime exempt status.
Ms. McCutchen served as Administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, appointed by President Bush and confirmed by the Senate in 2001. She was the primary architect of the 2004 revisions to the overtime exemption regulations, the first major changes to the regulations in 55 years.
Before joining DOL, she was senior counsel for the Hershey Company in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Ms. McCutchen has been a volunteer leader of the Federalist Society since 1989. She served in leadership roles for the Northwestern Student Chapter and Chicago Lawyers Chapter. She currently serves in leadership for the Labor & Employment Practice Group, the Regulatory Transparency Project, and the Knoxville, TN Lawyers Chapter. She served on the Editorial Advisory Board of Law360, the Labor Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Small Business Legal Advisory Board of the National Federation of Independent Business, and a Policy Fellow at the ACU Foundation.
Ms. McCutchen is a graduate of Western Illinois University and Northwestern University School of Law. She clerked for the Hon. Daniel Manion on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
Shareholder, Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart
Chris Murray is Co-Chair of the firm’s Arbitration and Alternative Dispute Resolution Practice Group. In this role, he assists attorneys throughout the firm and clients nationwide to create, roll out, and enforce effective employment arbitration agreements and other ADR programs. Mr. Murray has extensive experience with class/collective action waivers in employment arbitration. Mr. Murray was part of the Ogletree team that successfully defended the use of such waivers in the Fifth Circuit’s landmark decision in D.R. Horton, Inc. v. N.L.R.B. Since then, he has successfully defended the enforceability of class action waivers in numerous subsequent cases and submitted an amicus brief on the subject on behalf of several major employers’ associations in the Supreme Court’s Murphy Oil case. Mr. Murray assists clients and the Firm’s attorneys to draft or revise arbitration programs focused on a client’s specific needs and goals and in light of changing law and evolving best practices.
Partner, Fusion Law, PLLC
Paul is the founding partner of Fusion Law, PLLC. He has extensive experience with state, federal, and global regulators building coalitions and implementing policies to promote innovation in financial services. He is responsible for designing and implementing the first state (Arizona) and federal (CFPB) FinTech sandboxes in the United States. He also designed the CFPB no-action letter and trial disclosure policies. He helped found the first global regulatory innovation coalition (Global Financial Innovation Network) and led the founding of the first U.S. regulatory innovation coalition (American Consumer Financial Innovation Network). He served on the Financial Stability Oversight Council subcommittee on digital assets. He also has drafted state-level laws on blockchain and utility tokens.
Paul also has significant enforcement and litigation experience. He led many multi-state consumer protection enforcement matters as Civil Litigation Division Chief at the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.
Prior to his government service, Paul practiced law in the areas of securities litigation and transactional work for approximately six years at two well-known law firms. He also clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Associate, Maynard Nexsen
Danielle is an Associate in Maynard Nexsen’s Cybersecurity & Privacy practice group. She utilizes her background in legislative and regulatory policy to advise companies in the rapidly evolving landscape of data privacy.
Before joining Maynard Nexsen, Danielle served as Senior Counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services’s Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology and Inclusion, where she advanced legislation to regulate cryptocurrencies. She also worked for a consulting firm providing regulatory strategy and compliance services to clients in the financial services industry. While in law school, Danielle worked in the office of Commissioner Hester Peirce at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Prior to attending law school, Danielle served as tax policy advisor to Senator Patrick Toomey and tax legislative assistant for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means. She also worked as a Tax Associate for a Big Four accounting firm.
Danielle holds a J.D., cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center. She earned her B.S., summa cum laude, in Commerce and Business Administration from the University of Alabama, where she also earned her Master of Tax Accounting. Danielle is a Certified Public Accountant licensed in Virginia.
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R. Pepper Crutcher, Alexander T. MacDonald, Tammy Dee McCutchen, Christopher C. Murray
The Administrative Procedure Act directs federal courts to review and to set aside final agency...
The Uniform Token Regulation Act: A Proposal for States to Lead on Regulatory Clarity for Digital Tokens
Paul N. Watkins, Danielle DuBose Cotter
Digital assets have the potential to transform financial services. They alter the status quo by...