IRA SPIRO

Mr. Spiro has been lead or co-lead counsel in approximately 40 class actions and FLSA representative actions.  He has handled employment litigation for more than 15 years, and has practiced litigation in California for 30 years.  He handles many cases that combine FLSA representative action claims and state law class action wage claims in California,  Massachusetts and North Carolina.  Along with Mr. Moss, he wrote a friend of the court brief in one of the leading California cases on class certification, Sav-On Drug Stores, Inc. v. Superior Court, 34 Cal.4th 319 (2004).

Mediation has become an integral part of much class action litigation.  Mr. Spiro, along with several judges and mediators, is one of the authors of the California Rules of Court on mediator conduct, Cal. Rules of Court 3.890 et seq.  He has lectured on mediation in class actions and legal ethics at four annual conventions of the State Bar of California.  He served an appointed term as chair of the California State Bar committee on mediation and arbitration.  He also served an appointed term on the ethics committee of the State Bar of California, which writes the official ethics opinions of the California Bar.  For many years he has been a member of the ethics committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association (LACBA), which writes the official ethics opinions of the LACBA.  He has authored numerous articles, papers and attorney seminar materials on legal ethics in class actions and other litigation, and the legal and ethical issues of attorney marketing, soliciting, advertising and the handling of combined wage & hour class actions/FLSA representative actions.

Mr. Spiro has been a legal aid lawyer and a deputy public defender.  Mr. Spiro received his B.A. in 1971 from Stanford University, Phi Beta Kappa, and his law degree in 1975 from the University of California, Berkeley’s Boalt Hall.