Most people who eventually sue their employer have never been in a courtroom before. Alan Greenberg has spent nearly four decades making sure that inexperience doesn’t put them at a disadvantage against a company with an in-house legal team on retainer.
From Cornell to a Career in Complex Litigation
Greenberg earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell University in 1985, double majoring in economics and government, before going on to Boston University School of Law, where he graduated cum laude in 1988. He’s admitted to practice in California, Nevada, and New York, along with the U.S. Supreme Court and several federal circuit and district courts, a breadth of admission that matters for a litigator whose cases regularly cross state lines against national employers.
From Wall Street to the Courtroom
Greenberg didn’t start out as a litigator. He began his legal career as a transactional lawyer on Wall Street, structuring and negotiating deals rather than arguing them in front of a jury. He later shifted into litigation, spending from 1990 to 2007 at high-end litigation boutiques in Orange County before joining an international law firm, where he met Wayne Gross, the former federal prosecutor who would later become his co-founding partner. That finance background from his Wall Street years turned out to matter more than a typical litigator’s resume: it gave him the ability to read a complex business transaction the way the people who structured it would, which is useful in employment cases that often turn on the fine print of a compensation agreement or a severance package.
Building a Practice Around Whistleblowers and Workplace Disputes
Greenberg’s employment practice centers on the cases that tend to be hardest for an individual to bring alone: whistleblower retaliation, discrimination, wage and hour disputes, and wrongful termination claims against employers with far more legal resources than the person suing them. His case results include a $6.1 million judgment in a whistleblower retaliation case and a $10 million settlement over an employer’s breach of an oral contract, along with a string of other multi-million dollar employment recoveries. Attorney Advertising: past results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future case.
What Makes a Whistleblower Retaliation Case Difficult to Win
A whistleblower retaliation claim requires proving three separate things: that the employee engaged in a legally protected activity, such as reporting suspected fraud or refusing to participate in something illegal; that the employer took an adverse action against them, whether termination, demotion, or a sudden negative performance review; and that the protected activity actually caused the adverse action, rather than the two events simply happening close together in time. Employers rarely admit the real reason for a firing outright, which means proving that causal link usually comes down to timing, internal communications, and inconsistencies in the employer’s stated justification. Cases like these often turn on documentation an employee never thought to keep and a timeline of events an employer would rather not have examined closely, which is part of why having a lawyer who has tried these cases before matters as much as the underlying facts.
A Practice Built Around Executives and Senior Professionals
Greenberg Gross has built a specific niche representing top executives, senior managers, and highly compensated professionals in employment disputes, a different kind of case than a typical hourly wage claim. An executive’s compensation often includes equity grants, deferred compensation, bonus structures tied to performance metrics, and non-compete or non-solicitation agreements that can restrict where they work next, all of which add layers of complexity that don’t exist in a straightforward overtime dispute. Unwinding what an executive is actually owed after a termination, or fighting a non-compete that’s written broadly enough to keep someone out of an entire industry, requires the kind of contract-literate litigation background Greenberg brought with him from his Wall Street years.
Trade Secrets and Unfair Competition Disputes
Beyond employment matters, Greenberg’s practice extends into trade secrets and unfair competition litigation, cases that often arise when an employee leaves one company for a competitor and is accused of taking confidential business information with them, or when a departing executive is alleged to have used insider knowledge to compete unfairly. These cases sit at an unusual intersection of employment law and commercial litigation, since they typically involve both a former employee’s rights and a company’s legitimate interest in protecting the processes, client lists, or proprietary methods it spent years building. Handling them well requires comfort with both sides of that equation, which is part of what Greenberg’s dual background in transactional finance work and litigation gives him.
Why California Wage and Hour Claims Are Rarely Simple
California’s wage and hour rules are stricter, and more heavily litigated, than the federal standard in most other states, covering everything from mandatory meal and rest breaks to how overtime is calculated for employees who are misclassified as exempt from it. A single misclassification, treating a worker as a salaried manager when their actual day-to-day duties don’t meet the legal test for that exemption, can affect years of unpaid overtime rather than a single paycheck. Equal pay claims raise a related but distinct question: whether employees performing substantially similar work are being paid differently based on a protected characteristic rather than a legitimate factor like seniority or merit. Both types of cases tend to hinge on the employer’s own internal records and job descriptions, which is why document-heavy litigation experience matters as much in these cases as courtroom presence.
Co-Founding a Firm With a Former Federal Prosecutor
In 2013, after Wayne Gross secured a $50 million jury verdict for a client in a dispute over the Hollywood Palladium redevelopment, that client encouraged Greenberg and Gross to start their own firm rather than keep trying cases like it under someone else’s name. Greenberg has described the move as a chance to escape the restrictions of a large firm: freedom to take on whatever case the two of them believed was worth their time, rather than whatever a larger institution’s client roster happened to include. Gross brought a career built on financial fraud and healthcare fraud prosecutions, work that earned him recognition from two U.S. Attorneys General and the FBI Director, while Greenberg brought his finance-informed litigation practice and employment law focus. The firm has grown from its single Orange County office into locations across California, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.
Recognition Built Over Nearly Four Decades
Greenberg has been repeatedly named to the Daily Journal’s Top 100 Lawyers in California, recognized as a “Winning Litigator” by the National Law Journal and an “Elite Boutique Trailblazer” by the same publication, and named a “California Trailblazer” by The Recorder. He’s held an AV Preeminent rating from Martindale-Hubbell, the organization’s highest possible rating for legal ability and ethics, for more than 20 consecutive years, a distinction based on confidential evaluations from other attorneys and judges rather than a client survey or a paid submission. He’s also a Fellow of the Litigation Counsel of America, an invitation-only honorary society limited to trial lawyers who meet a peer-reviewed standard for both skill and professionalism, and has been recognized by both Super Lawyers and Best Lawyers in America.
Staying Involved Outside the Courtroom
Greenberg serves on the board of directors of Project Youth OC, an Orange County nonprofit that works with more than 1,500 young people a year through trauma-informed programs covering juvenile diversion, substance use prevention, and college and career preparation. He previously chaired the Judiciary Committee of the Orange County Bar Association, a role that typically involves vetting and advocating for judicial appointments and monitoring how the local court system is functioning, along with a past presidency of the Cornell Alumni Association of Orange County. That kind of sustained local involvement, in a legal community as well as a civic one, is part of how a litigation boutique built around employment and civil cases builds the kind of reputation that gets a case referred rather than advertised for. It’s also a reflection of a fairly common pattern among trial lawyers who spend their careers representing people going up against institutions: a parallel commitment to institutions, bar associations, alumni networks, youth nonprofits, that are built to help rather than to defend against a claim.
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