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Mercedes M. Maldonado
Mercedes M.. Maldonado was born and raised in the Bronx. Her education was assisted by a full scholarship to college from District Council 37, the union with which her father was affiliated. After graduating with honors from Long Island University, Ms. Maldonado attended Boston University School of Law, where she discovered that Labor Law was her calling.
Ms. Maldonado has been practicing labor law for twelve years. Early on in her career, she represented the concerns of employers with a firm called Burke, Horan & Macri. It was there that she acquired the basic skills for labor litigation and arbitration, not to mention first hand insight into how the “other side” operates.
Ms. Maldonado had a stroke of luck in 1995 when she began an association with a law firm that represented the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association (“COBA”), Local 100 of the Transport Worker’s Union and the American Maritime Officers, to name a few. She found a mentor, Carl Rachlin, Esq., a preeminent attorney in the area of labor law and civil rights for over fifty years. Interesting cases on behalf of COBA members came my way immediately. In April, 1996 the New York Law Journal published Quaranta v. Jacobson, a decision she won which challenged the Department of Correction’s effort to invoke a rarely used statute, called the Public Officer’s Law, to justify their “automatic” termination of a correction officer without any charges or a hearing. Not long thereafter, BNA’s Labor & Employment Law Newsletter featured a decision she won for COBA in federal court, Laboy v. Seabrook, involving the efforts of a member to invalidate a dues increase. In the arbitration arena, Carl and she collaborated and achieved an important victory for COBA, featured in the Chief Leader on July 16,1999, in which the arbitrator interpreted the Military Leave clause in COBA’s collective bargaining agreement to entitle members to eight more days of military leave than the New York State Military Leave Law provides. The arbitrator rejected the Department’s claim that the contract was intended to provide the same number of days as the statute.
More recently, Ms. Maldonado steered to victory the first case to be decided under the “victims of domestic violence” amendment to the New York City Human Rights law, bringing attention to this little known provision and paving the way for other victims to assert their rights. She is also defending on appeal a major victory that she won for COBA, McGarrigle v. NYCERS, involving the pensionability of longevity earnings.
On July 1, 1999, Ms. Maldonado moved to the newly launched law firm of Koehler & Isaacs where I continue my representation of COBA as before. Ms. Maldonado brings to this firm significant practice experience before arbitrators, state and federal trial and appellate courts, as well as before the National Labor Relations Board, the Public Employment Relations Board, and the New York City Office of Collective Bargaining. “Representing unions has been a privilege that I intend to continue for many years to come,” said Ms. Maldonado.
Areas of Experience
> Labor and Employment Law
Education
> J.D. Boston University, 1992
> B.A. Long Island University, C.W. Post 1988, cum laude
Memberships
> New York State Bar Association
Bar Admissions
> New York, 1993
> United States District Court for the Southern and Eastern Districts, 1994
> United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, 1998
> Massachusetts, 1993 |
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