Mike Tooley serves as general employment counselor and advocate for employers regarding their workforces, including daily employee issues, collective bargaining, arbitration, administrative proceedings before the NLRB, EEOC and other federal and state agencies, and employment litigation in state and federal courts.
Mike represents employers of all sizes and types—both union and non-union, public and private, blue collar and white collar, and those with or without in-house legal staffs—concerning the wide range of labor and employment issues they face. He is an experienced advocate for employers in court, in arbitration and in front of various administrative agencies and has defended employers in legal proceedings in more than 16 states.
From his more than 29 years of representing employers in litigation and collective bargaining, Mike has discovered that the "secret sauce" for winning workplace disputes is to prevent them from arising in the first place, and the best way to do that is by helping organizations and their leaders create better workplaces in which their employees are developed, cultivated and engaged.
Because he believes in this formula so strongly, Mike has supplemented his legal practice by becoming a certified Leadership and Strengths Coach and co-founding Upstream Principles LLC, an Ice Miller affiliate dedicated to providing leadership coaching and employee development training. As a certified coach, Mike guides leaders and teams on how to recognize and develop their strengths, with the goal of creating better workplaces, more engaged and productive workforces and fewer employment disputes.
In addition to his role as advocate, Mike spends a considerable amount of his practice training human resource professionals and other business executives on how to comply with the various employment laws that affect them, while still getting the best from their workforce. He presents frequent training sessions to supervisors, managers and human resource professionals on such crucial employment issues as:
- Sexual harassment prevention and investigation
- Interviewing skills
- Conducting effective workplace investigations
- Union awareness
- Effective communication skills
- Compliance with ADA, FMLA and other statutory obligations
In addition, he is a frequent public speaker at seminars for human resource professionals, business executives and other lawyers on a wide variety of topics, both legal and non-legal.
Mike is the past chair of Ice Miller's Labor and Employment Group. He joined Ice Miller in 1991 after graduating from law school and has practiced labor and employment law exclusively since that time.
He was born in Henderson, Kentucky, and received his Bachelor of Arts from Vanderbilt University in 1988 graduating
summa cum laude. He holds a juris doctor from Duke University School of Law, where he graduated with high honors in 1991. While in law school, he was a member of Law and Contemporary Problems and the Moot Court Board.