On My Side 2025 Awardee
The Litigator of the Year Award honors an individual who has shown exceptional skill in securing justice for survivors of forced labor or sex trafficking. This year, we are delighted to present the award to Daniel Werner, a partner at Radford Scott, LLP.
For more than twenty years, Daniel Werner has been a leader in the strategic litigation community, filing forced labor cases for trafficking survivors in the federal courts. Since filing his first forced labor case soon after the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), Werner has litigated multiple groundbreaking cases across the United States. His legal advocacy has shaped the law and won justice for trafficking survivors. From the David v. Signal International LLC victory to his recent win in a diplomatic domestic worker trafficking case, Werner’s tenacious and innovative legal strategies have inspired the legal community. His zealous representation of construction workers, farm workers, domestic workers, shipyard workers (and so many more) has held perpetrators accountable through civil litigation.
A tireless advocate, Werner has meticulously and thoughtfully litigated strategic forced labor cases with a trauma-informed approach. His cases have increased public understanding of the pervasive nature of forced labor across industries, exposing the sophisticated schemes that employers use to exploit and abuse workers. He has won significant damages, with public awards exceeding $20 million dollars for trafficking survivors. The legal precedents that Werner has established are providing a path for survivors to continue to pursue justice now, and for years to come.
Werner’s impact extends far beyond the cases that he has filed. Colleagues in the field consistently remark upon the selfless way that he has dedicated himself to the litigation community. His leadership has propelled strategic litigation for trafficking survivors; his leadership has helped to build this community. He is a generous and thoughtful colleague, always eager to lend a hand (or a brief).
Through Werner’s creative and compassionate advocacy, he is a driving force in the strategic litigation movement to end forced labor. We are honored to call him a colleague. And now we are honored to call him the Litigator of the Year.
About the Honoree
Daniel Werner is a bilingual (Spanish/English) lawyer with 28 years’ experience advocating for workers and victims of egregious civil rights abuses. He achieves positive results for his clients through careful listening, strategic thinking, and tenacious advocacy.
Werner began his career as an attorney representing farmworkers who toiled in orange groves, onion fields and apple orchards. He filed litigation, including several large class actions, against the agricultural employers who routinely underpaid and exploited his clients. Werner developed his cases through community legal education, outreach visits to rural labor camps, and in-depth research. 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 U.S. Court of Appeals called “a paradigmatic case of racial profiling.”
Werner went on to receive a prestigious 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 and day laborers. Among his many ground-breaking cases, he successfully led the first-ever lawsuit for labor trafficking survivors under newly enacted federal anti-trafficking protections. Through that case and others that followed, Werner 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. He also was a Board member of the non-profit Freedom Network USA, the preeminent human trafficking survivor advocacy organization.
In 2008, Werner joined the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) where he litigated complex workers’ rights and civil rights cases, built and led diverse teams, and developed new legal theories benefitting immigrants in the South. For example, he spearheaded 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. To recognize this groundbreaking win, Werner and his team were named Public Justice Foundation’s 2015 Trial Lawyers of the Year. Starting in 2017, Werner pioneered and directed SPLC’s Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative, an ambitious project aimed at providing high-quality representation to immigrants detained in the Deep South.
In addition to his work for clients, Werner has extensive experience with international consulting and policy advocacy. For example, as a volunteer with the American Bar Association’s Rule of Law Initiative, he advised and trained local governments and community leaders in Mongolia, China, and the Solomon Islands to develop a legal framework for combatting human trafficking and achieving justice for survivors of forced labor. He has testified about migrant labor exploitation in front of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and he traveled to the Russian Federation with representatives of the Obama Administration as part of a Bilateral Presidential Commission addressing forced labor and migration issues.
Werner also has dabbled in academia, including teaching Introduction to American Law at Georgia State University. This year, he co-authoring an article on forced arbitration of human trafficking survivors’ civil lawsuits, published in the Villanova Law Review.
As a Partner at Radford Scott LLP, Werner has led groundbreaking employment and civil rights litigation, principally class actions on behalf of immigrant workers. In his five years at the firm, he has achieved important and precedent-setting legal victories, resulting in settlements and judgments of over $15 million.
Werner received his law degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo School of Law in 1996. He graduated from Grinnell College with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Spanish in 1991 and was conferred with an Honorary Doctor of Laws in 2017. He is currently licensed to practice law in Georgia and New York. In his free time, Werner enjoys photography, caving, running, and baking bread. He is proud to have finished multiple ultra-marathons, marathons, half-marathons, century rides, and triathlons. Werner lives in the Atlanta area with his wife, three children, and a very outgoing cat.