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Danielle Osei

Associate

Employment · Philadelphia

Danielle Osei is brought in when an employer has to answer a claim from someone who works for it or used to: a charge of discrimination filed with the EEOC, a demand for unpaid overtime on behalf of a whole shift, a city investigator asking for two years of posted schedules. She is an associate in Harwell Brandt’s Employment Group and works on cases before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, and the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Most of her clients are regional employers in logistics, food service and manufacturing.

Representative matters

  1. Defended a Lehigh Valley logistics company in the Eastern District against a collective action under the Fair Labor Standards Act and a class action under the Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Act, brought by warehouse workers seeking pay for time spent in security screening. Member of the defense team; drafted the opposition to conditional certification and took the depositions of five opt-in plaintiffs. At stake: three years of back wages for several hundred workers, and liquidated damages under the federal statute.

  2. Represented a commercial bakery at a five-day jury trial in the Eastern District on a former plant manager’s claims of age discrimination under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act. Member of the trial team; drafted the motions in limine and the proposed jury instructions, and examined two of the company’s witnesses. At stake: back pay, front pay, and the plaintiff’s claim that the violation was willful.

  3. Represented a restaurant group with more than thirty locations after Philadelphia’s Office of Worker Protections opened an investigation under the city’s Fair Workweek law. Working with the partner leading the matter, audited two years of posted schedules against the fourteen days’ advance notice the law requires and drafted revised good faith estimates for the group’s Philadelphia employees. At stake: predictability pay for past schedule changes, and how the group would schedule its city locations going forward.

Representative matters describe the lawyer’s role and what was at stake. Each matter turned on its own facts and law, and prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

How the work is done

She builds the record before the first filing: payroll and timekeeping data, the personnel file, and the emails the other side will ask for. On wage claims she works with the client’s payroll staff to reconstruct hours shift by shift, so the exposure is a number before the first mediation. On agency charges she drafts the position statement and prepares each manager for the investigator’s interview with a written outline of the questions to expect. She joined Harwell Brandt in 2022, directly after law school.