Nathan Schacht joined Baker Hostetler’s Denver office in 2010 after practicing in the Employment Law Department of an international firm in New York City for almost two years. Mr. Schacht focuses his practice in the areas of employment litigation and counseling.
Mr. Schacht has experience defending employers in all aspects of labor and employment litigation, including wage and hour class actions and single-plaintiff actions alleging various types of claims, including discrimination based on disability, race, national origin, gender, FMLA leave, sexual harassment, wrongful discharge and breach of contract. Mr. Schacht also has experience advising clients on compliance with international and domestic employment laws and has assisted employers in expanding and downsizing employer operations around the world, including advising companies on workforce expansions, mass layoffs and office closures, and executive terminations. In this regard, he has prepared employment, separation and consultant agreements and employee handbooks, both domestically and internationally.
In 2009 and early 2010, as part of a cross-office team, Mr. Schacht defended a large financial institution against numerous state-wide wage and hour class actions alleging, among other things, failure to pay overtime, failure to compensate for missed meal and rest periods and misclassification. Also during this time frame, Mr. Schacht was a member of various teams that advised and represented several clients on a pro-bono basis, including a child in deportation proceedings in New York City (a partner in the representation was the agency Kids in Need of Defense (“KIND”)) and two international non-profit organizations dedicated to protecting the environment.
In the summer of 2009, as part of a team of five, Mr. Schacht advised and assisted one of the world’s largest media companies in drastically reducing a portion of its global workforce in over ten countries, including the closure of numerous offices. His team successfully completed the global reduction in force with all terminated employees signing release agreements.
During his last semester of law school, Mr. Schacht completed a full-time legal externship at the Peter Cicchino Youth Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York City. As part of this experience, Mr. Schacht advocated on behalf of indigent youth in various government proceedings involving such issues as welfare, housing and immigration, and led legal drop-in clinics weekly at two homeless shelters in New York City. In one notable experience, Mr. Schacht assisted the head attorney in investigating and preparing the briefing and expert report for an asylum case involving a gay, HIV+ man from Granada. As a result of these efforts, the immigration court granted the man asylum.
Prior to graduating from law school, Mr. Schacht presented his paper, “Coming Out the Hard Way: Nonconsensual Disclosure of Sexual Orientation During the Adoption Process,” at the Sixth Annual Adoption Policy Conference at New York Law School.
Mr. Schacht is a member of the American, New York and Colorado Bar Associations.