Services

Fred Dawkins has over 25 years of experience helping employers manage personnel-related issues having a legal dimension.  He guides businesses through every component of the employment relationship, and does so with a continued focus on providing real-world, practical solutions.  Mr. Dawkins partners with his clients to help leverage their human capital to achieve organizational goals.  In so doing, Mr. Dawkins serves as a counselor in the broadest and truest senses of that word.

Mr.Dawkins' specific expertise includes the following: 

  • Counseling businesses on compliance with employment-related laws, including those prohibiting gender, race, age, national origin and veterans' status discrimination; governing employee compensation (wage and hour); and outlining leave obligations.
  • Developing written policies, forms, procedures, and agreements to manage and control employment relationships, including employee handbooks; employment contracts; independent contractor agreements; non-disclosure, non-competition, and confidential information/trade secret agreements; and separation agreements.
  • Designing employee discipline, drug/alcohol testing, and compensation frameworks.
  • Providing day-to-day guidance on navigating employment situations with immediacy.
  • Training supervisors how to effectively manage employees to maximize performance and minimize turnover.
  • Performing sensitive workplace investigations, including those involving senior executives and/or having potential organizational-level impacts.
  • Performing compliance audits.
  • Working with clients to develop and implement diversity management strategies that address inclusion-related goals while at the same time furthering bottom-line business objectives.
  • Developing severance plans (both voluntary and involuntary) and assisting with corporate reorganizations/reductions in force.
  • Representing employers in local, state, and federal equal employment administrative proceedings.
  • Serving as lead counsel in employment discrimination, retaliation, trade secret, restrictive covenant, business tort litigation, wage and hour, and other employment-related trials in state and federal courts.
  • Representing employers in collective bargaining grievance arbitrations.
 Mr. Dawkins also handles general business disputes, and in this regard has litigated breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, tortious interference with business relations, tortious interference with contractual relations claims.  In June 2016, Mr. Dawkins completed a multi-day jury trial where he successfully defended a claim of false designation of origin under the federal Lanham Act), and unfair and deceptive trade practices under Georgia law.