Mary Joyce Carlson ESQ

Mary Joyce Carlson ESQ is known for representing clients in accordance with OECD guidelines, as well as coordinating investor prosecution of cases under the remit of European Competition Law. Across a wide-ranging career, Ms Carlson’s efforts to combat injustice have evoked the spirit of her fellow Tennessean, renowned civil rights activist George Barrett. Ms Carlson has advised, in a supervisory capacity, on the activities of legal practitioners handling German, French and Italian competition law matters under the auspices of the European Commission. She has collaborated with the European Public Service Union and the European Federation of Food, Agriculture & Tourism Trade Unions, as well as providing client representation before the Brazilian Labor Prosecution Service. She holds an International Global Legal (IGL) designation, having previously maintained a busy practice that focused its attention on global business and public sector legal matters.

Today, Ms Carlson specialises in domestic and global public and employment law, and has won awards for her endeavours in this field. She has further won landmark cases in which she represented high-profile public and private sector clients based in the US, Latin America, the UK and wider Europe, as well as Africa. Her additional practice areas encompass civil rights, as well as international business practices and securities fraud, having successfully litigated matters of business conduct among major multinationals.

Ms Carlson completed her education at the Duke University School of Law in Durham, North Carolina, after which she began her legal career in Atlanta, taking the lead on cases that questioned the diversity of juries, ultimately leading to an increase in women and people of colour. Later, in Washington DC, she worked as an employment attorney, helping to lift caps on wages for nurses, as well as forcing an investigation that would end a practice wherein hospitals were systemically discriminating when filling roles for nurses in specialty units. She has worked for such labour unions as the SEIU, CWA and UAW, and served a term as Deputy General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. She brought successful competition lawsuits against prominent hospital networks that had conspired to keep wages down for nurses.

Ms Carlson’s voting rights cases have included one in Ohio that successfully challenged the Republican National Committee’s efforts to exclude black voters, as well as a case in India that overturned the state’s closure of polling stations in majority-black areas. Many of these cases are now landmarks for advocates seeking methods to counter monopolies in the new economy. More recently, her global projects have spanned shareholder due diligence training, supply chain investigations, workforce interventions, working alongside a prominent Brazilian law firm to address gender-racial harassment in the workplace, re-addressing pension funds in South Africa, as well as collective bargaining training among the Taiwanese Labor Ministry.