Experience
Bonnie Farrell is a certified Professional in Human Resources and a Senior Paralegal with seventeen years of experience, nearly sixteen of those in Labor and Employment. Bonnie has primarily focused on employment litigation and human resources advice.
For eleven years prior to returning to school to become a paralegal, Bonnie managed a number of units for two different restaurant companies, so she brings with her a variety of skills and practical experience in business management. Her management roles at both companies included responsibility for all personnel decisions within each unit. For the second company, in addition to managing the day-to-day operations of her units, Bonnie developed and implemented both a topical training program she conducted for the employees at all the units and an interviewing and hiring training module which she taught periodically to small groups of supervisors and managers.
Capabilities
- Litigation: Bonnie has been involved in labor and employment litigation since 1994. Her first litigation was a groundbreaking class action suit, the first such federal suit to certify a class in a sexual harassment hostile environment action. Since then, Bonnie has worked on employment litigations large and small, involving everything from all kinds of discrimination claims to wage claims to non-compete disputes, getting involved at the beginning of the case and seeing it through to the end, including through the appellate process. Bonnie regularly drafts all types of discovery, removal pleadings, declarations, factual summaries for motions, and both routine and complex correspondence.
Evidence management is a key component of the paralegal’s role in a litigation, and Bonnie has developed systems and practices for handling discovery and evidence based on an evaluation of the volume and scope of the evidence in a particular matter. Her cases have ranged in scope from 400 total pages of documentary evidence to over a million documents, and from two to a few dozen witnesses. Bonnie works closely with the attorneys on her cases to determine the likely volume of evidence and the most efficient way to manage it throughout the case.
Bonnie has developed and managed document databases using Attenex, Ringtail, Summation, and Concordance to manage, review, and produce documents. In a recent matter, Bonnie organized and managed a group of 18 paralegals working across several Dorsey offices to review and cull tens of thousands of unexpected documents down to the most crucial documents prior to attorney review within a very short time frame.
Bonnie works directly with the client’s representatives, taking responsibility for identifying, gathering, tracking, managing, reviewing for responsiveness and privilege, and producing documentary and other physical evidence to opposing parties during discovery and as exhibits for trial. Bonnie also has extensive experience with witnesses, identifying potential witnesses through document review, identifying evidence related to each witness, and liaising with fact and expert witnesses throughout the deposition and trial process.
- Human Resources Advice: Bonnie frequently acts as the liaison between the client and the supervising attorney on Human Resources advice matters, handling the ground work of the project, at a lower billing rate, and to the client’s advantage. While Bonnie does not directly advise clients on human resource issues, she has extensive experience drafting legally compliant employee handbooks and policies, including conducting appropriate supporting legal and factual research, reviewing and revising existing policies and handbooks for legal compliance, drafting employment offers, employment agreements and separation agreements, and drafting human resources documents like employment applications, checklists, background check notifications, etc. Bonnie is also regularly involved in drafting documents required for reductions in force, including reductions subject to the federal WARN Act and applicable related state statutes.
- Union-Management: Bonnie performs factual research and compiles statistics in preparation for collective bargaining, drafts portions of collective bargaining agreements, drafts materials to educate management and employees about the collective bargaining process, and gathers and compiles materials needed for labor arbitrations.
- Practice support management and training: Bonnie has been instrumental in developing her practice group’s procedures and system of checks and balances. Most recently, and using relatively new software, Bonnie was the primary developer of an electronic litigation notebook template and its related procedures that her practice group now uses in all its litigations, allowing the attorneys to work on- and off-line, with key case documents at their fingertips, across Dorsey offices, and from anywhere in the world.
Bonnie also trains litigation paralegals in Dorsey’s Seattle offices. She does one-on-one, hands-on training of support staff members whose goals include promotion to paralegal or eventual attendance at law school, and she co-developed and is currently the leader and organizer of a series of “classroom style” sessions for all the litigation paralegals in the Seattle office on various aspects of litigation practices and procedures.
Certification
Bonnie became a certified Professional in Human Resources in 1999, and has maintained her certification throughout her paralegal career.
Memberships
Society for Human Resources
Lake Washington Human Resource Association
Education
Bemidji State University
Bachelor of Arts with honors, English, 1979
Portland Community College
Paralegal Certificate, 1992