Ten Years In

Ten years ago, I opened the doors of Dolce Law PLLC.

I did not come to this work in a straight line. Before I was a plaintiff-side employment lawyer, I was a Human Rights Officer with the United Nations Mission in South Sudan, sitting across from people whose dignity had been violated by the very institutions meant to protect them. That work shaped how I see mine work now. Discrimination in the workplace is not an abstraction or a policy violation to be resolved with a settlement number. It is a human being who was lied to, disrespected, or discarded by an employer they trusted, and who deserves to be heard, believed, and made whole.

I built this firm as a company of one. I wanted every client who called Dolce Law to be able to reach me. I wanted to know the details of a client’s story well enough to carry them into a demand letter, a deposition, or a courtroom. Ten years later, I still believe that closeness to the client’s story is the reason this firm can do what it does.

What I have learned

I have learned that the law moves slowly and that clients live in real time. A termination that takes an employer thirty seconds to deliver can take years to litigate, and my job is to make sure that gap does not become another injury on top of the first one.

I have learned that the strongest cases are rarely won on the law alone. They are won by understanding an institution well enough to show a jury, a mediator, or opposing counsel exactly how it failed, and why that failure was not an accident.

I have learned that representing someone in the aftermath of discrimination or retaliation requires patience, and that I am a better lawyer now for having built that patience.

And I have learned, over and over, that this work is never really about one case. It is about whether workplaces get to keep operating the way they always have, or whether someone is willing to make them answer for it.

To my clients

To everyone who entrusted me with their story, thank you. I know what it costs to relive a termination, a hostile workplace, a retaliation, in as much detail as a case requires. I know what it means to hand a stranger the facts of the worst professional experience of your life and ask them to make something right out of it. I have never taken that trust lightly, and I never will.

To my mentors

To the mentors who shaped this decade, thank you as well. Some of you taught me the law itself, the doctrine and the procedure and the strategy that makes a case winnable. Others taught me something I did not learn in any classroom: how to run a practice, how to say no to work that was not right for this firm, and how to build something sustainable instead of something that simply survives. Both kinds of guidance built this firm in equal measure, and I am grateful for both.

What comes next

Ten years in, I am not interested in getting bigger for its own sake. I am interested in getting better: sharper cases, deeper investigations, and a practice that keeps pace with how workplace discrimination actually happens now, not how it happened a decade ago. I want to keep taking the cases that matter even when they are hard, keep saying yes to clients who have been told no by other firms, and keep building the kind of practice I would want in front of me if I were on the other side of the table.

Here is to the next ten years.

—Wendy Dolce, Founder and Principal, Dolce Law PLLC 

Dolce Law PLLC represents employees throughout New York in employment and civil rights matters. Contact the firm for a confidential consultation.