James Graham Lake
Nominee
Nominee to the District Columbia Superior Court
On July 31, 2024, President Biden nominated James Graham Lake to the District Columbia Superior Court. Currently serving as the chief of the Workers’ Rights & Antifraud Section at the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia, Lake is a skilled labor lawyer with extensive experience representing and vindicating workers’ rights in state and federal courts.
Biography
Lake earned his B.A., with distinction, from Amherst College in 2005 and his M.S. from Pace University in 2008. He graduated magna cum laude with a J.D. from New York University School of Law in 2012.
Legal Experience
After graduating from law school, Lake served as a law clerk for Judge Mark R. Kravitz, Judge Janet Bond Arterton, and Judge Michael P. Shea of the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut from 2012 to 2013. He then clerked for Judge Harry T. Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 2013 to 2014.
Following his clerkships, Lake worked as an associate at Bredhoff & Kaiser PLLC from 2014 to 2019. At Bredhoff & Kaiser, Lake represented local and national labor unions in both state and federal court.
In 2019, Lake joined the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia (OAG), where he worked as a trial attorney in the Office of Consumer Protection. In that role, he represented D.C. in complex proceedings, which included acting as the first chair in a trial that recovered losses for tenants who were subjected to deceptive representations.
Since 2021, Lake has served as the chief of the Workers’ Rights & Antifraud Section of the District of Columbia OAG, where he leads the district’s efforts to honor and protect workers’ rights to fair wages, overtime pay, and sick and safe leave. As chief, Lake supervises the OAG’s affirmative wage-and-hour litigation at the Superior Court of District of Columbia — a vital recourse for workers to recover wages wrongfully withheld.
Legal Career
The following cases are representative of Lake’s legal career:
District of Columbia v. MJ Flooring, LLC, et al.
Case No. 221 CA 003061 B; In re: Levy Premium Foodservice Limited Partnership; In the Matter of District Dogs, Inc.
As chief of the District of Columbia OAG, Lake worked as part of a team that secured almost $1 million from three separate companies who acted in violation of core District of Columbia wage-and-hour-laws. Each settlement recovered restitution and benefits for workers as well as civil penalties for the government. This included the settlement of a suit brought against B&B Solutions, a flooring installation company who failed to pay janitorial workers minimum wage and sick leave. Of the $612,000 recovered, $475,000 was paid to workers as restitution. In a similar case that arose following breaches of sick leave payment laws committed by Levy Premium Foodservice, Lake and his team successfully negotiated a settlement agreement,which provided resounding benefits for wronged employees. Specifically, Levy Premium Foodservice agreed to provide all their employees with eight additional hours of paid sick leave (totaling to a benefit value of over $164,000), conduct an audit of its payroll records to correct prior erroneous sick leave payments, and pay $35,000 in civil penalties to the government. The last case concerned breaches of labor law perpetrated by District Dogs, a pet care company with multiple locations across D.C. District Dogs, which engaged in tip theft, agreed to pay $90,159.75 to workers and an additional $30,000 to the district in civil penalties. District Dogs also agreed to introduce new policies relating to tip-distribution and timekeeping to ensure compliance with critical labor laws moving forward.
District of Columbia v. Swahili Village M Street, LLC
Lake represented the District of Columbia in a 2023 lawsuit against Swahili Village, a restaurant that violated multiple district labor laws by stealing tips from their staff and paying workers less than $5 an hour. The case resulted in a settlement agreement, under which the restaurant’s owner agreed to pay $526,973. As a result of the proceedings, the 72 employees who had their wages stolen were awarded a sum of over $260,000 — an average of around $36,000 in damages per worker. Swahili Village, which agreed to change its labor policies moving forward, was also ordered to pay $197,614 in penalties to the government and agreed to submit compliance reports for three years to ensure future compliance with wage-and-hour laws.