Rene S. Roupinian

RENÉ S. ROUPINIAN is a founding partner at Raisner Roupinian LLP.

For over 24 years, Ms. Roupinian has devoted her practice to the litigation of Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act cases, representing tens of thousands of employees who were terminated without sufficient notice in violation of federal and state WARN laws. The firm’s WARN practice is national and its WARN cases have and continue to cover a wide range of industries, including telecommunications, transportation, retail, mining, mortgage and manufacturing. A majority of the cases Ms. Roupinian litigates are initiated as class actions and are frequently filed in bankruptcy court as adversary proceedings. 

In 2008, Ms. Roupinian, her colleague Jack A. Raisner and their client, Joe Aguiar, were invited to submit testimony to the U.S. Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee by Senator Kennedy (Chair) on the 20th anniversary of the WARN Act’s enactment, regarding the Act and its possible reform. Mr. Aguiar, who lost his manufacturing job without notice when his employer shut down, testified before the HELP Committee.

In 2017, the WARN Act practice group won a landmark United States Supreme Court decision on behalf of 1,800 terminated truck drivers. Czyzewski v. Jevic Holding Corp., 137 S. Ct. 973, 977, 197 L. Ed. 2d 398 (2017). The decision has been hailed as one of the top ten most important decisions in bankruptcy law and prompted Law360 to name the WARN practice group the Bankruptcy Group of the Year, noting its "employment attorneys made an outsized impact on the bankruptcy world this year." In recognizing the quality of their work, Law360 wrote: “With a focus on representing employees cut loose by companies heading into bankruptcy, [the firm's] WARN Act group finds itself involved in insolvency cases frequently. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notice Act requires employers of a certain size to provide adequate notice of their intent to lay off large numbers of workers, and [it's] team represents the interests of those jilted employees when they don't receive that notice. Their expertise in the employment arena, especially as it relates to bankruptcy, led to their representation of more than 2,000 truckers who were unexpectedly laid off by Jevic’s 2008 Chapter 11."

Ms. Roupinian has lectured on the WARN Act and the prosecution of WARN claims as class actions in bankruptcy court. She has been quoted on WARN law rights and her cases have been cited in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, American Lawyer, Associated Press, USA Today, Forbes, Newsday, Times-Gazette, The Herald News, and others.

She received her B.A. degree from University of Michigan and her J.D. from Michigan State University College of Law, where she was a member of the Moot Court Executive Board. Ms. Roupinian is a mentor through the Michigan State University College of Law alumni board, and recently endowed a multi-year program that boosts students' readiness for the bar exam while preparing them for the rigors of a career in the law. She formed Raisner Roupinian LLP in 2020 after representing employees in WARN Act cases as a partner at another New York firm. Prior to 2002, she was a partner in a Detroit law firm where she litigated ADA, FMLA, ADEA, and race and gender discrimination cases on behalf of employees, and class actions on behalf of homeowners, consumers and taxpayers.