Thomas & Solomon LLP

Focus and practice areas

Thomas & Solomon LLP works one side of the employment relationship: the employee's. That choice shapes the whole docket. The Rochester firm handles wage and hour claims, discrimination, harassment and retaliation matters, whistleblower actions, ERISA claims, and Fair Credit Reporting Act claims.

Contract review and negotiation sits alongside those litigation categories. The firm reviews employment agreements and negotiates severance for high-level executives. In my opinion, that pairing tells you something useful about how the firm is built. It has a practice for the worker whose paycheck came up short and a practice for the executive reading an exit package.

What each area covers

Wage and hour claims are the unpaid overtime, the shorted tips, the hours worked off the clock. Discrimination, harassment and retaliation matters cover treatment on protected grounds and the consequences that follow a complaint. Whistleblower actions involve employees who reported something and paid a price for it.

The ERISA and Fair Credit Reporting Act work adds two statutory areas that many employment firms leave alone. ERISA governs benefit plans, pensions and health coverage. The FCRA reaches background checks and credit reports used in hiring decisions. Both require statute-specific knowledge that carries over poorly from general litigation.

Individual cases and group actions

The firm takes single-employee matters and class or collective actions. Those are different machines. A one-plaintiff discrimination case turns on documents, testimony and a narrow factual record. A collective wage action turns on payroll data across a workforce, notice to potential members, and the certification fight that decides whether the case proceeds as a group at all.

Thomas & Solomon runs both. Its attorneys have represented single employees and large groups of workers. Class work requires the firm to front costs and carry a matter through years of procedure before any recovery arrives, which is a structural commitment few small firms make.

Where the firm appears

The firm's attorneys practice in state and federal courts across the United States. For an employment practice, that reach matters. Federal wage law and Title VII apply nationally, and a class of workers can span multiple states even when the employer's headquarters sits in one.

Agency practice runs alongside the court work. The firm pursues discrimination claims before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Most federal discrimination claims require a charge with the EEOC before a lawsuit can be filed, so the agency stage is where much of this work begins.

A matter on the public record

One filing gives a concrete look at the firm's wage and hour work. Thomas & Solomon brought a lawsuit on behalf of banquet servers employed at the Marriott Syracuse Downtown, alleging the hotel violated New York Labor Law. Jessica Lukasiewicz, an associate at the firm, was quoted about the case in a Syracuse.com article.

Banquet server claims under New York law typically involve service charges added to event bills and whether those amounts reached the staff who worked the events. The statute has specific rules about how such charges must be handled. Cases of this kind tend to cover everyone who worked the same banquets under the same policy, which is why they arrive as group claims.

Why this matter is worth noting

A named filing against an identified employer is checkable. Anyone can look up the case. As a reviewer, I weigh a specific public matter more heavily than a page of general claims about experience, because a filing carries a docket number and a defendant who gets to answer.

How the team is presented

The site names Jessica Lukasiewicz as an associate. Her law school and admission year are absent from the pages our research covered. The firm's site references a track record spanning two decades and states no founding year.

The firm carries the names of two partners. That naming convention is standard for a partnership of this kind, and it points to a closely held structure where the named partners set the direction of the practice.

What a prospective client should know

Employee-side employment law has a particular shape. The client has usually lost a job or is about to, and the opposing party controls most of the documents. Payroll records, personnel files, internal complaints and HR notes all sit with the employer, and getting them requires discovery. A firm that does this work daily knows which records to demand and when.

Thomas & Solomon publishes intake forms on its site rather than a direct email address. Prospective clients reach the firm through those forms or by phone. The firm maintains Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.

Fit

The practice areas point toward certain situations. An employee owed wages, a worker facing treatment tied to a protected characteristic, someone punished after reporting misconduct, an executive handed a severance agreement to sign, a job applicant rejected over a flawed background check. Each of those maps to a listed practice area.

In my opinion, the FCRA and ERISA lines are the most distinguishing part of the list. Wage and discrimination work is common across employment firms. Benefit plan disputes and background check claims are less so, and their presence suggests the firm handles matters where the injury is financial and documentary.

How this listing reads on the evidence

The verifiable material here is the practice area list, the courts and agencies where the firm appears, one named associate, and one identified lawsuit against a named employer. That is a modest but solid evidentiary base for an employment practice.

The firm's own pages describe two decades of work without fixing a start date. Case results, recovery figures and client counts are not published on the pages our research reviewed. Readers evaluating the firm will find its clearest public marker in the Syracuse banquet server filing, which names a defendant, a statute and an attorney who spoke on the record.