Paula M. Weber is a partner with Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittmen LLP. She is leader of Pillsbury’s Employment & Labor practice. Ms. Weber focuses on complex employment litigation, supplemented by compliance advice and counseling on employment issues for both large institutional employers and smaller companies. Ms. Weber has handled a wide variety of individual and multiplaintiff cases in federal and state court, including race, sex, disability, and age discrimination suits, as well as breach of employment contract, wrongful termination, fraud, defamation, whistle-blower, misappropriation of trade secrets, wage and hour and other employment-related litigation. She has trial experience in both state and federal court, including trials in defamation, breach of contract, sex discrimination, and termination in violation of public policy cases. Ms. Weber also has wide-ranging ADR experience, most recently the successful defense in a binding arbitration of law firm partners charged with breach of fiduciary duty by their former partner.

Ms. Weber has extensive experience representing employers in putative and certified class actions. She was lead attorney in a trial of a wage hour class action involving 3000 class members that was successfully settled immediately prior to the close of plaintiffs’ case. She represented a large employer in a pay and promotion sex discrimination suit with 850 class members. She has litigated putative class actions alleging age discrimination and breach of contract arising out of reductions in force for two of the largest employers in the State of California with no class being certified in either case. She defended an employer in a putative race discrimination class action in which the class allegations were dismissed. She also defended a major utility company in a putative class action in which agency employees/independent contractors sought employee benefits in which class certification was denied. Her wage hour class action experience includes the defense of both state wage and hour law and nationwide FLSA collective actions in which she has defended employers in the food, retail, financial, utility and technical industries.

Ms. Weber has spoken on a variety of labor law topics including lectures at the Practising Law Institute and Mealey Publications Conference on employee class actions and representative actions. She has been designated a “Super Lawyer” in California for all three years of this listing.

In 1981, Ms. Weber graduated magna cum laude from Colgate University with a B.A. and honors in philosophy and religion. She was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1985, she earned her J.D. with high honors from George Washington University Law School, where she was on Law Review and was a member of Order of the Coif.

Ms. Weber is admitted to practice in California.

Tania P. Shah is the director of corporate social responsibility with Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, a position she has held since 2007. Her role, one of the first of its kind for a major American law firm, encompasses workplace inclusion, sustainability, pro bono, community outreach and charitable contributions. Her work at Pillsbury has received honors from Diversity Best Practices (2009 CEO Diversity Leadership Award), Working Mother magazine (2008 Top 10 Company for Working Mothers and 2008 Top 10 Company for Mature Workers) and the San Diego Association of Governments (2008 Diamond Award for our Green Commuter program). Her work has also been recognized in numerous legal and business publications.

Prior to joining Pillsbury, Ms. Shah served as the executive director of the California Minority Counsel Program (CMCP), a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing diversity in the legal profession. In 2003, Ms. Shah was selected for a Center for Social Innovation Fellowship at the Executive Program for Non-Profit Leaders at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business for her accomplishments at CMCP. Prior to joining CMCP, Ms. Shah practiced corporate law at Morrison & Foerster LLP. Before law school, she served as an AmeriCorps member with the San Francisco Urban Service Project. Ms. Shah is a frequent speaker in the areas of corporate social responsibility, nonprofit/for-profit partnerships, and diversity.

Ms. Shah, an attorney admitted in California, is not engaged in the practice of law in her current position at Pillsbury. She holds a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law and a B.A. in social welfare from the University of California, Berkeley.