Jenny Yu

"My job is to be fully aligned with my client’s interests, weighing every strategy against real risk and cost rather than chasing a win for its own sake." —Jenny Yu

Employers across industries turn to attorney Jenny Yu to defend them against wage and hour claims, class actions, and Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA) representative actions.

She also represents employers facing wrongful termination, discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and unequal pay claims brought under the Fair Employment and Housing Act and the California Labor Code. To help employers proactively address workplace challenges, Jenny advises on wage and hour standards, leave laws, and personnel policies. Her clients range from startups and established companies to educational institutions, governmental entities, and nonprofit organizations.

With significant courtroom experience, Jenny skillfully handles employment disputes as well as business cases, with an emphasis on complex civil litigation. While Jenny prioritizes early resolution when it serves a client’s interests, she is prepared to take matters through jury or bench trial. Before focusing on employer defense, Jenny represented employees in wage and hour litigation and counseled employers on employment law compliance, giving her both a firsthand view of how these cases are built and insight into the complexities of implementing new policies and procedures.

Jenny also conducts workplace investigations, including sensitive matters involving allegations of sexual abuse, drawing on the trauma-informed perspective she developed through her earlier public interest work. Before joining Epstein Becker Green, Jenny was a partner in the Los Angeles office of a national law firm, where she was a member of the Labor and Employment and Korean Business and Litigation practices.

Earlier in her career, Jenny represented youth in foster care in San Francisco and Alameda Counties, advocating for hundreds of underserved and marginalized children and young people as they navigated the juvenile court system, educational barriers, and instability. She worked closely with social workers, teachers, therapists, and community-based organizations. Jenny also provided legal education and volunteer opportunities to law students as a supervising attorney for the FosterEd program at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Prior to public interest law, she worked as a volunteer attorney on an appeal before the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a tribunal formed by the United Nations to try crimes against humanity and war crimes arising out of the Sierra Leone Civil War.

Outside of work, Jenny enjoys hiking, working out, arranging flowers, and spending time with her two girls, family, and their rescue ”Yorkie-Pom,” Louis I. Kahn. She is conversationally fluent in Korean and continues to study Spanish.

What Jenny Delivers for Clients

• Compliance That Keeps Pace with Growth: As companies grow beyond their startup years, wage and hour issues that were manageable with a smaller workforce can develop into significant litigation and settlement exposure. Jenny helps these organizations identify which compliance gaps to prioritize before they become the basis for a class action.
• Exposure Sized to the Facts, Not First Impressions: A national company’s overall presence can lead plaintiffs to assume a class runs into the thousands, when its California footprint is much smaller. Jenny traces where and how a workforce operates to formulate litigation strategy; in one matter, her analysis showed that a projected putative class of 2,000 had only two actual putative class members, allowing the client to defend against its actual exposure rather than the perceived size of its pockets.
• Strategy Shaped by 360-Perspective: Understanding how a plaintiff is likely to develop and pursue a wage and hour claim can be critical to assessing risk and strategy early. Having litigated these cases for employees and employers, Jenny brings both perspectives to evaluating each option’s cost and likelihood of success, helping clients choose the path that best fits their actual risk tolerance.
• A Trauma-Informed Approach to Sensitive Investigations: Workplace and other sensitive, internal investigations involving allegations of sexual misconduct or sexual assault call for particular care. Jenny brings a trauma-informed approach shaped by years representing survivors of sexual abuse, helping clients gather the facts while employing a human-centric, person-to-person approach.
• Compliance Programs Built From Litigation Experience: Resolving a case often does not address the workplace practices that created or contributed to the underlying exposure. Jenny is experienced in conducting systemwide audits of payroll, timekeeping, and human resources practices and presenting her findings and recommendations to corporate leadership, helping clients prioritize strategic changes that can reduce the risk of future claims.

Wage and Hour Class Action and PAGA Litigation

• Secured dismissal of all claims against a client and client’s payroll provider in a class action and PAGA case, based on investigation and analysis which established a lack of extraterritorial jurisdiction over work performed by California residents in foreign countries and other states.
• Moved to compel arbitration on behalf of a multi-location restaurant operator facing a class action and PAGA case brought by a former employee. In arbitration, Jenny obtained dismissal of the individual PAGA claim for failure to timely notify the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, laying the groundwork for dismissal of the stayed representative PAGA claim for lack of standing.
• Mediated a class action and PAGA case brought against a country club client, navigating records and policy issues through a careful and detailed presentation of the case, and obtained a positive resolution outcome.
• Resolved a class action and PAGA matter involving significant alternative workweek schedule allegations. Jenny obtained dismissal of the representative claims and secured a nominal-value settlement of the individual claims through strategic alternative dispute resolution measures.
• Secured releases from nearly all members of a putative class through an aggressive “Pick Up Stix” campaign in a class action and PAGA case brought against a medical services provider. Jenny negotiated a near-nominal settlement of the individual claims and dismissal of two class and representative matters.
• Led the unified defense of multiple corporate defendants and their counsel in negotiating a global settlement of a representative PAGA case and obtaining court approval of a uniquely structured PAGA and individual settlement.
• Analyzed time and pay data for 10,000 putative class members—comprising millions of lines of data—in a gig economy misclassification action for civil penalties under PAGA, calculating violation rates and developing damages models to inform litigation strategy and resolution.
• Contributed to an appeal before the California Supreme Court addressing whether plaintiffs in overlapping, sister PAGA actions had standing to intervene in a settlement approval process and to appeal a grant of settlement approval.

Education

• University of San Francisco, School of Law (J.D., 2007)
• University of California, Berkeley (B.A., 2003)

Professional & Community Involvement

• Resolve Law LA (MSC Program for Los Angeles Superior Court), Settlement Officer
• Rose Bowl Aquatics Center:
  • Board of Directors
  • Committee on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Community Outreach