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Lauren Paxton    

Legal Profession Speaker Partner at Calcagni & Kanefsky, LLP, Former Federal Prosecutor

Lauren Paxton is a leader in the legal profession, regularly handling high stakes, C-suite investigations and employment disputes. Paxton serves as the Labor and Employment Chair of the New York County Lawyers' Association (NYCLA), and has been quoted in national publications including Forbes magazine. As a former federal prosecutor and former securities enforcement counsel, Paxton leads a team serving a special investigative counsel to the Governor of New York, while separately representing management and executives in finance, emerging technologies, and healthcare. Paxton speaks to a broad audience, both within and beyond the legal profession, on leadership, resiliency, professional development, legal trends, and issues of interest to women in the legal profession.

As a Partner with boutique litigation powerhouse Calcagni & Kanefsky, Paxton focuses her practice on litigation and internal investigations, concentrating on all matters of employment law. A seasoned trial attorney, she has vast experience in federal, state, and regulatory matters, as well as arbitration. She regularly handles employment litigation, workplace investigations, government inquiries, high-stakes workplace disputes, and C-suite employment negotiations. Paxton has achieved noteworthy successes for her clients, including litigating precedent-setting published decisions at the trial and appellate levels, appearing in matters at all levels of the judicial system up to the United States Supreme Court.

Paxton is a former Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Delaware, where she investigated and prosecuted criminal and civil cases. During her six-year tenure, she successfully tried to juries both criminal and civil matters, with a focus on federal employment crimes including embezzlement, trade secret theft, and other misappropriation and false statement offenses. Paxton also defended the government in employment litigation in federal court. Before private practice, she served as Enforcement Counsel with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in New York. At FINRA, Paxton investigated and arbitrated matters involving employee embezzlement, theft, and regulatory violations in the securities industry. She began her legal career in the New York office of a large national firm, where she focused on commercial litigation and corporate restructuring.

Speech Topics

Workplace Investigations: The Means and the Ends

For every headline-grabbing story of an executive fallen from grace, or a corporate C-suite torn apart by accusations of misconduct, hundreds if not thousands of episodes of equal or greater measure never come to light. Why? The leadership of most organizations know that a deftly-performed workplace investigation is both the means and the ends when responding to high-stakes workplace disputes. In addition to serving the practical function of enabling the organization to gather the information it needs to make a thoughtful and appropriate determination on how to proceed, the interview and document-gathering process of an investigation permits the aggrieved and the alleged transgressor an opportunity to be heard. When conducted properly, a workplace investigation is both a tool that serves the organization and the modality that brings the matter to a conclusion. In this presentation, Paxton shares insights and best practices for workplace investigations, as well as her perspectives on the way organizations can mitigate the risk of the catastrophic public and private fallout when C-suite disputes spill into the public sphere. Paxton draws on her unique background as a former federal prosecutor and a workplace investigator in private practice.

Resiliency in the Practice of Law

Why is it that so few women rise through the ranks to become leaders in private practice? In this presentation, Paxton shares anecdotes and lessons learned in her own journey to partnership. She highlights the unique challenges she faced as a woman in a profession still dominated by men in the senior ranks, as well as universal challenges faced by both women and men in building a successful practice.

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