Patricia Jeanne Howze, BS.MA,JD
— Century Corporate Counsel

Since 2002, Ms. Howze has served as a litigation consultant and an expert witness for both plaintiff and defense in numerous matters involving standards and best practices of human resources management. She has been certified as an expert by court and has testified at depositions, arbitrations, and trials.

Ms. Howze has more than thirty years experience in labor and employment law. Currently, she is a principal at Century Corporate Counsel (CCC) a management consulting firm whose primary focus is on assisting employers remain in compliance with constantly-changing employment laws and human resources processes. In that capacity Ms. Howze has provided a wide range of legal and management services to start-ups and multi-national established companies in various industries.

During her ten years at the Federal Labor Relations Authority and the Solicitor’s Office for the Department of Labor, Ms. Howze developed an expertise in training, investigating, mediating and litigating a full range of traditional labor and employment-related cases.

Ms. Howze then transitioned to Wells Fargo Bank, a Fortune 500 company of over 100,000 employees. At Wells Fargo Ms. Howze successfully established and supervised the employment/labor practice group for the Legal Department. Ms. Howze continued at Wells Fargo’s Legal Department for another ten years, where she supervised the investigation and litigation of multi-million dollar class action matters, and advised human resources managers, senior executives and managers on a vast array of employment/labor matters. She also conducted training, reviewed legislation, and recommended legal responses and business strategies. Ms. Howze’s successful negotiations at Wells Fargo effectively capped, and then reduced, the Bank’s growing number of litigation matters. Ms. Howze served on numerous Bank committees and sat on the Board of the Wells Fargo Foundation.

Since founding her own company, Ms. Howze has completed extended assignments for Clients. In one assignment, she worked under a six month contract at Visa International in the position of senior employment counsel. In that position, Ms. Howze gave advice and counsel to the general counsel and executive management and assisted in setting company-wide policy. Ms. Howze also served as the Interim Senior Vice President of Human Resources and Chief Employment Counsel for ABM Industries, Inc., a Fortune 500 company of approximately 75,000 employees. As ABM’s interim Director of Human Resources, Ms. Howze reported directly to the CEO and the COO. She supervised a staff of 24 employees in the corporate office, and 73 human resources managers and representatives throughout the United States. Ms. Howze’s duties included advising the CEO, CFO, COO and other senior executives.

Over more than 30 years, Ms. Howze has conducted or supervised hundreds of investigations into allegations of inappropriate conduct and violations of employment laws. Many of these investigations have involved executive managers and board directors. Additionally, Ms. Howze has trained thousands of senior executives, union and management officials, exempt and non-exempt employees, bankers, lawyers, human resource managers and personnel, educators, government and non-government personnel. She has conducted training in all employment-related subjects, including, but not limited to, harassment, discrimination, proper hiring and firing techniques, interviewing techniques, writing effective performance evaluations, immigration issues, family leave, independent contractor issues, and wage and hour matters.

As an active community and bar association volunteer, Ms. Howze has served on numerous boards and committees, including the Board of the Oakland East Bay Symphony. While serving as co-chair of the Women’s Issues sub-committee of the Bar Association of San Francisco (BASF), Ms. Howze and other BASF committee chairs traveled to the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. Ms. Howze is also a former Board member of the California Women Lawyers Association.

Ms. Howze is a graduate of DePaul University, and The University of Chicago. She has been admitted to the bars of California, Illinois, the U.S. District Court, Northern District, California and the U.S. District Court, Northern District, Illinois.