Allan Dinkoff has more than 30 years of experience handling complex commercial litigation and employment matters. For the past 15 years, Mr. Dinkoff has focused almost exclusively on employment issues, principally in the financial services industry.
Before joining Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP in 2009, Mr. Dinkoff was a Managing Director at Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc., where he ran the firm's Employment Law Group and was responsible for Merrill Lynch's employment issues world wide. He advised the Board of Directors and executive management at Merrill Lynch on employment and related matters, handled complex international cross-border issues, negotiated executive compensation and separation arrangements, handled restrictive covenant litigation and successfully defended discrimination and wage & hour class and collective actions, as well as high profile individual discrimination claims. He was a critical partner in crafting the firm's diversity efforts, and provided training to senior managers on a variety of topics, ranging from diversity to discrimination laws to effective decision making. He was the principal advisor to the Board and executive management on the numerous employment issues arising from the research investigations, the Enron criminal indictments, and the sub-prime crisis. He also was the architect of the strategies that permitted the firm to reduce its headcount by over one third in 2002 without any litigation or significant settlements.
Mr. Dinkoff spent 13 years in private practice at the New York law firm of Baer, Marks & Upham, LLP before going in-house. He was a partner in the firm's litigation department, where he handled general commercial litigation, with substantial experience in complex commercial disputes, securities, commodities, class actions, derivative suits, regulatory enforcement matters, and real estate litigation. While at Baer Marks, Mr. Dinkoff secured a landmark appellate decision establishing for the first time in the country an absolute immunity for statements made by the securities industry to self-regulatory organizations about terminated employees on Form U-5 (Herzfeld & Stern, Inc. v. Beck, 572 N.Y.S.2d 683 (1st Dep't 1991)), and successfully represented Comex Clearing Association through regulatory and litigation issues growing out of the first failure of a commodities clearing firm.
Mr. Dinkoff has been active in the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, where he has served for over twenty years on numerous committees dealing with professional ethics. He has lectured widely on class actions, employment, professional ethics, and Sarbanes-Oxley issues in various forums, including PLI programs, City Bar programs, the annual American Employment Lawyers Council meeting, and the annual SIFMA Law & Compliance meeting.