For those practicing in the area of labor and employment, understanding the core elements of the law is crucial to providing advice and counsel. Labor and employment lawyers need to understand hiring, firing and everything in between. Equally important for many attorneys, however, are the procedural and best practices components of litigating those matters.

Although the economy continues to show signs of recovery, employees are still actively pursuing legal claims related to their employment. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's newly released Performance and Accountability Report, the agency received 93,272 private sector discrimination charges in Fiscal Year 2013. That number represents a decrease of 6,000 charges from three prior years, but it also ranks among the top five busiest fiscal years on record. The United States Courts Caseload Statistics Report reveals that within the federal district court system alone, there were 14,078 employment civil rights cases, 2,020 Americans with Disabilities Act cases and 7,764 Fair Labor Standards Act cases filed between April 1, 2012 and March 31, 2013. These significant numbers do not include the volume of claims based on other grounds, such as breach of a restrictive covenant.

Practical Law has a wide variety of resources to get attorneys up to speed on substantive labor and employment topics, and also offers a collection of materials to support a defense-based labor and employment litigation practice. The following is a selection of key content designed for use in labor and employment litigation.

Understanding the basics:

For use in discovery:

For use in settlement:

Find more helpful content in Practical Law's Employment Litigation: Single Plaintiff Employment Discrimination Toolkit and Preventing and Responding to an EEOC Charge Toolkit. In addition to Practical Law's Labor & Employment offerings, we offer a full spectrum of litigation materials in our Federal Litigation service.