Laura J. Maechtlen is a member of Seyfarth Shaw’s seven-member Executive Committee and the National Chair of the Labor and Employment Department. She also led the Firm’s Global belonging, equity, and inclusion work for more than a decade. Her practice is focused on counseling related to people analytics and DEIB work, as well as employment litigation, and includes the defense of class, collective, and multi-plaintiff actions.

Laura is a national leader on issues related to diversity and inclusion in the legal industry and has held a variety of leadership positions through which she has advocated for systemic improvement in the legal industry in DEIB. She currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Law Firm Anti-Racism Alliance, and the Board of the Center for Workplace Law. She is a previous Latina Commissioner for the Hispanic National Bar Association, President of the National LGBT Bar Association and the California Minority Counsel Program, and served as a Fellow for the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity (LCLD), among service for other organizations focused on supporting and elevating underrepresented groups in the legal industry.

Laura speaks and publishes regularly on a variety of employment law and litigation topics, and issues regarding diversity and inclusion in the legal profession, and has been quoted on those topics by Harvard Business Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Reuters, Vogue, The Daily Journal, Employment Law 360, and many others.