Erika Freeman

Erika focuses her practice on employment counseling and litigation, helping clients anticipate and solve workplace problems. When counseling clients, she advises on a range of sensitive human resources issues, including hiring and recruiting, worker classifications, employee separations, reductions in force, and trade secret misappropriation. Erika represents employers throughout the life cycle of litigation before federal and state courts in employment disputes ranging from complex employment discrimination claims to restrictive covenant matters. She helps clients grow and protect their businesses by developing and implementing personnel procedures, and she regularly drafts employment, confidentiality, noncompete and separation agreements.

Prior to joining Cooley, Erika was an attorney at an international law firm in New York City, where she represented corporate clients in government and internal investigations and commercial civil disputes. She also represented individual defendants in criminal cases before the US District Courts for the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York. At Harvard Law School, Erika represented low-income clients in Massachusetts state court through Harvard Defenders, the Criminal Justice Institute and the Housing Law Clinic, among other clinical engagements. Before law school, in California and in her home state of Vermont, Erika worked as an estate-planning paralegal, writer for food and outdoor magazines, administrative assistant, assistant wedding photographer, receptionist, tutor, park attendant, boat cleaner, barista, house cleaner, paper deliverer and server at a tacky Hawaiian-themed restaurant.