?Sabe RICO? A Review of Tools and Best Practices for Litigating Farmworker Cases Under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

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This is a follow-up to the November 2023 Zoom training on the RICO Act in Farmworker Cases. The first part of the workshop will be a brief review of the RICO basics we discussed in the 2023 training and more recent developments in the law (people who did not attend the 2023 training will get enough information during the review to participate meaningfully in this workshop). Most of the workshop will be practical: using a "ripped from the headlines" H-2A hypothetical, we will break up into small groups and develop an abbreviated fill-in-the-blank complaint incorporating best practices for (1) pleading RICO enterprises; (2) pleading a pattern of racketeering activity/continuity; (3) addressing potential causation issues; (4) addressing extraterritoriality and in pari delicto concerns: (5) and incorporating charts. Groups will then present their respective "complaints" to the participants. For each group complaint, we collectively will brainstorm about what works (and may not work). The goal is to come out of this workshop knowing enough concrete RICO skills (and related puns) to be dangerous. !Que RICO!

understand the basics of civil RICO claims and the potential benefits and risks of including RICO claims in farmworker litigation.
understand and correctly plead RICO enterprises and a pattern of racketeering activity, including continuity.
avoid the pitfalls of causation, extraterritoriality, and in pari delicto.
understand how to organize complex RICO allegations in a complaint (including use of charts) so they make sense and do not terrify the judge.

Daniel Werner, Juris Doctorate

Partner/Attorney

Radford Scott, LLP

Dan Werner is a bilingual (Spanish/English) lawyer with 28 years’ experience advocating for workers and victims of egregious civil rights abuses. Dan began his career as an attorney representing farmworkers. He filed litigation, including several large class actions, against agricultural employers. His representation resulted in dozens of damages awards and settlements benefitting thousands of migrant workers in Florida and New York. He also represented immigrant clients in civil rights litigation, including a precedent-setting case the Third Circuit called “a paradigmatic case of racial profiling.” Dan went on to receive an Echoing Green Fellowship and co-founded the non-profit Workers’ Rights Law Center of New York. There, he continued to defend the labor and civil rights of exploited immigrant workers. Among his many ground-breaking cases, he successfully led the first-ever lawsuit for labor trafficking survivors under the TVPA. Through that case and others that followed, Dan developed important legal precedent and became a sought-after expert on civil litigation for trafficking survivors, publishing on the subject and lecturing in the United States and internationally. In 2008, Dan joined the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) where he litigated workers’ rights and civil rights cases. For example, he helped spearhead a seven-year labor trafficking lawsuit against a Mississippi-based shipyard operator on behalf of hundreds of pipefitters and welders recruited from India to help repair Gulf Coast oil rigs damaged during hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The workers paid up to $25,000 for positions based on false promises of green cards. After a six-week jury trial, the first group of five plaintiffs was awarded $14 million in damages. Most recently, Dan pioneered and directed SPLC’s Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative, which provided high-quality representation to immigrants detained in the Deep South. In addition to his work for clients, Dan has extensive experience with international consulting and policy advocacy.