Peter Romer-Friedman

PETER ROMER-FRIEDMAN is Partner at Outten & Golden LLP Washington, DC, and a member of the firm’s Class Action Practice Group. He has a diverse litigation practice that focuses on employment discrimination, employee benefits, fair housing, and credit discrimination, at the trial court and appellate levels.

Mr. Romer-Friedman has served as lead or co-lead counsel in actions that secured over $1.4 billion in monetary relief and groundbreaking programmatic changes to governmental and corporate institutions, including six of the largest USERRA class settlements, two of the largest fair housing settlements, one of the largest credit discrimination settlements, the first LGBTQ employment bias class settlements, and one of the largest reported discrimination settlements with an office of the House of Representatives.

Currently, Mr. Romer-Friedman is leading dozens of class cases that challenge how companies discriminate in advertising employment, housing, and financial services opportunities on online platforms like Facebook. In March 2019, Mr. Romer-Friedman was the lead negotiator in a novel multi-case settlement in which Facebook agreed to make sweeping changes to its ad platform to stop employment, housing, and credit advertising from discriminating based on age, sex, race, and other protected classes. He is also currently the lead or co-lead counsel in eight class or putative class actions challenging the denial of wages, benefits, or jobs to national guard and reserve members.

Prior to joining the firm in 2016, Mr. Romer-Friedman was the Deputy Director of Litigation of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. From 2009 to 2015, he served as a civil rights and employment class action litigator at another national class action firm. From 2007 to 2009, Mr. Romer-Friedman was labor counsel to the Senate Labor Committee and its Chairman Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Mr. Romer-Friedman clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Los Angeles, and has taught civil rights law as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

Mr. Romer-Friedman earned his B.A. in economics (with honors) from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and was selected as a Truman Scholar by the Harry S Truman Scholarship Foundation. He graduated from Columbia Law School, where he was a James Kent Scholar and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, served as a managing editor of the Columbia Journal of Law & Social Problems, and externed for Judge Shira Scheindlin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Prior to law school, Mr. Romer-Friedman was a legislative representative and union organizer for the United Steelworkers and he co-founded the Worker Rights Consortium, a non-profit organization that monitors labor rights in apparel factories worldwide.