SEND AN E-MAIL TO THIS FELLOWJoseph L. Paller Jr.
Los Angeles, CA
Joseph Paller is a principal of Gilbert & Sackman, a Law Corporation in Los Angeles, California. He serves as neutral or co counsel to Boards of Trustees of Taft Hartley trust funds, including joint apprenticeship and training funds, pension, profitsharing, 401(k), and money purchase plans, health plans, and labor management cooperation committees. Joe has designed and qualified multiemployer plans in Arizona, California, Minnesota, Nevada and Texas. His plan designs have served as models for plans in Massachusetts, Missouri and New Mexico.
Joe is a Chapter Co-Editor of Employee Benefits Law, the leading legal text on ERISA, published jointly by the American Bar Association and Bloomberg BNA. He is a Union Co-Chair of ABA Subcommittee on Jointly-Administered Plans, a subcommittee of the Employee Benefits Committee of the Labor and Employment Law Section. His articles on have appeared in many books and legal journals, including the Labor Lawyer published by the American Bar Association, the California Labor & Employment Law Review published by the California Lawyers Association, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Arbitrators published by Bloomberg BNA, and various white papers published by the AFL CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee.
Joe lectures frequently for the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, most recently in 2018 at the 64th Annual Employee Benefits Conference in New Orleans. Since 2000, he has spoken at 60 other events, including programs sponsored by the ABA, the American Arbitration Association, the National Labor Relations Board, the State Bar of California, the AFL CIO Union Lawyers Alliance, the UFCW Attorneys Conference, the Labor & Employment Relations Association and its subchapters, and the California School Personnel Commissioners Association.
In addition to his work at Gilbert & Sackman, Joe is deeply involved in education. He is as an Adjunct Professor at the Gould School of Law at the University of Southern California, teaching the law school’s first class on labor arbitration. For more than 25 years, Joe has taught college courses for the Labor Center at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, including classes on legal rights for California workers, basic and advanced labor law, and employee benefits.
Since 2001, Joe has served as a member of the Personnel Commission of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which provides civil service protections for 38,000 classified employees in the nation’s second largest school district. Joe was honored as the A2017 Distinguished Personnel Commissioner@ by the California School Personnel Commissioners Association in a ceremony held in San Diego.
Joe is a member of the Board of Governors and a Fellow of the American College of Employee Benefits Counsel. He is also a Fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers.
Joe was honored in U.S. News & World Report as the “2020 Lawyer of the Year” and the “2017 Lawyer of the Year” in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area in the field of “Labor Law-Union,” as chosen by Best Lawyers in America. Only a single lawyer in Los Angeles and surrounding counties is named “Lawyer of the Year” in a field of practice.
In 2018, 2019 and 2020, Joe was recognized in Lawdragon’s 500 Plaintiff Employment Lawyers, an honor reserved for the top 500 plaintiff-side employment lawyers in the United States. The Daily Journal (the leading legal newspaper in California) has ranked Joe as one of the top 75 employment attorneys in California.
Joe has been chosen as one of America’s Most Honored Lawyers for 2020, the inaugural year for this award by the American Registry. Only the top 1% of America’s lawyers were selected for this award.
For 20 consecutive years, Joe has been selected as a Super Lawyers® in employee benefits or labor law, a distinction awarded to only 5% of lawyers in California. Since 1998, Joe has been rated AV-Preeminent®, the highest level of professional excellence, by Martindale Hubbell.
Joe has been admitted to practice law in California, Nevada, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of the UCLA School of Law. Since 1995, Joe has served as an employment dispute and commercial dispute arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association.
