Overview

Richard Saks represents individuals and groups in a wide variety of employment and civil rights claims. His clients include labor unions and other social justice organizations engaged in legal battles, to defend and advance the living standards and civil rights of working people. Attorney Saks takes on difficult but important legal causes, such as unionization for immigrant and low-wage workers, defense of protective legislation for workers, voting rights of minority citizens, and issues related to fairness in the political process.

Attorney Saks also represents individual employees in all workplace-related claims including employment discrimination, unpaid wages and overtime, sexual harassment, workers compensation, and covenants not to compete.

Experience

After law school, Attorney Saks clerked for one year for federal judge Elaine Bucklo of the United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois, and has been employed as an associate and shareholder with Hawks Quindel and its predecessors since 1993.

Attorney Saks represents various Wisconsin labor unions in issues related to contract enforcement, internal governance, employee rights, and unionization efforts. Since 1993, Attorney Saks has represented the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association in all matters affecting teachers and other support staff, and represented the union in its legal challenges to privatization of public education. He has been counsel to the Milwaukee Branch of the NAACP for two decades in various voting rights matters, including:

• a challenge under the Voting Rights Act to racial discrimination in judicial elections
• a successful 2008 challenge to Attorney General Van Hollen’s so-called HAVA checks
• the recent challenge by the Milwaukee Branch of the NAACP and Voces de la Frontera to Wisconsin’s Photo ID law
• recent successful efforts by minority voters to remove restrictive voting requirements during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.